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A TALE OF TWO CITIES 




AND 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWM DROOD 



CHARLES DICKENS 


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS- BY H. K. BROWNE 
AND LUKE FILDES 


A REPRINT OF THE EDITION CORRECTED BY THE 
AUTHOR IN 1869, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BIOGRAPHICAL 
AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL, BY CHARLES DICKENS 
THE YOUNGER 



Neto gork 

MACMILLAN AND CO. 


AND LONDON 


1896 


All rights reserved 


pX'i 

%o 


Copyright, 1895, 

By MACMILLAN AND CO. 


Norbjooli 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. TJ.S.A. 


f>v t3. S. V 


CONTENTS, 


r 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES and THE MYSTERY 
OF EDWIN DROOD. 

PAGE 

List op Illustrations xv 

Introduction xxiii 

A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

In Three Books. 

BOOK THE — RECALLED TO LIFE. 

CHAPTER I 

The Period 1 

^ CHAPTER II 

The Mail 3 

CHAPTER III 

The Night Shadows 9 

CHAPTER IV 

The Preparation 13 

CHAPTER V 

The Wine-shop 22 

CHAPTER VI 


* 


The Shoemaker 


vii 


32 




viii CONTENTS. 

ROOK THE SECOND — GOLDEN THREAD. 


CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Five Years Later 43 

CHAPTER II ^ 

A Sight 48 

CHAPTER III 

A Disappointment 54 

CHAPTER IV 

Congratulatory 66 

CHAPTER y 

The Jackal 72 

CHAPTER VI 

Hundreds of People 77 


CHAPTER VII 


Monseigneur in Town 88 

CHAPTER VIII 

Monseigneur in the Country 96 

CHAPTER IX 

The Gorgon’s Head 100 

CHAPTER X 


Two Promises 


. 110 


CONTENTS. 


IX 


CHAPTER XI 

PAGE 

A Companion Picture 117 

CHAPTER XII 

The Fellow of Delicacy 120 

CHAPTER XIII 

The Fellow of no Delicacy 127 

CHAPTER XIV 

The Honest Tradesman 131 

CHAPTER XV 

Knitting 140 

CHAPTER XVI 

Still Knitting . ' 151 

CHAPTER XVII 

One Night 160 

CHAPTER XVIII 

Nine Days . . . 164 

CHAPTER XIX 

An Opinion 170 

CHAPTER XX 

A Plea 176 


X 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER XXI 

PAGE 

Echoing Footsteps 180 

CHAPTER XXII 

The Sea still Rises 190 

CHAPTER XXIII 

Fire Rises 196 

CHAPTER XXIV 

Drawn to the Loadstone Rock 201 


BOOK THE THIRD— mir; TRACK OF A STORM. 


CHAPTER I 

In Secret 212 

CHAPTER II 

The Grindstone 223 

CHAPTER III 

The Shadow 228 

CHAPTER IV 

Calm in Storm 232 

CHAPTER V 


The Wood-sawyer 


. 237 


CONTENTS. 


XI 


CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

Triumph 242 

CHAPTER YII 

A Knock at the Door 248 

CHAPTER VIII 

A Hand at Cards 253 

CHAPTER IX 

The Game Made 265 

CHAPTER X 

The Substance of the Shadow 275 

CHAPTER XI 

Dusk 287 

CHAPTER XII 

Darkness 292 

CHAPTER XIII 

Fifty -two ^ 299 

CHAPTER XIV 

The Knitting Done 300 

CHAPTER XV 

The Footsteps die out For ever 319 


CONTENTS. 


xii 

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Dawn ' 337 

CHAPTER IT 

A Dean, and a Chapter also 340 

CHAPTER III 

The Nuns’ House . . . . 349 

CHAPTER IV 

Mr. Sapsea 361 

CHAPTER V 

Mr. Durdles and Friend 369 

CHAPTER VI 

Philanthropy in Minor Canon Corner 376 

CHAPTER VII 

IMore Contidences than One 383 

CHAPTER Vm 

Daggers Drawn 392 

CHAPTER IX 


Birds in the Bush 


401 


CONTENTS. xiii 

CHAPTER X 

PAGE 

Smoothing the Way 414 

CHAPTER XI 

A Picture and a Ring 427 

CHAPTER XII 

A Night with Hurdles 439 

CHAPTER XIII 

Both at their Best 453 

CHAPTER XIV 

When shall these Three meet again ? 403 

CHAPTER XV 

Impeached 474 

CHAPTER XVI 

Devoted 482 

CHAPTER XVII 

Philanthropy, Professional and Unprofessional .... 492 
CHAPTER XVIII 

A Settler in Cloisterham ^ . . . 505 

CHAPTER XIX 


Shadow on the Sun-dial 


512 


XIV 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER XX 

PAGE 

A Flight 619 

CHAPTER XXI 

A Recognition 529 

CHAPTER XXII 

A Gritty State of Things comes on 534 

CHAPTER XXIII 


The Dawn Again 


550 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

PAGE 

FRONTISPIECE AND VIGNETTE 

THE MAIL . 7 

THE SHOEMAKER . 37 

THE LIKENESS 63 

CONGRATULATIONS ......... 69 

THE STOPPAGE AT THE FOUNTAIN 93 

MR. STRYVER AT TELLSON’s BANK 123 

THE spy’s funeral 133 

THE WINE-SHOP 143 

THE ACCOMPLICES 177 

THE SEA RISES ... * 193 

BEFORE THE PRISON TRIBUNAL 217 

THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR ........ 251 

THE DOUBLE RECOGNITION 259 

AFTER THE SENTENCE 289 

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

O 

IN THE COURT 336 

» 

UNDER THE TREES ......... 359 

AT THE PIANO .... ...... 389 


XV 


XVI 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


ON DANGEROUS GROUND ..... 
MR. CRISPARKLE IS OVERPAID .... 
DURDLES CAUTIONS MR. SAPSEA AGAINST BOASTING 

“good bye, rosebud darling!” 

MR. GREWGIOUS HAS HIS SUSPICIONS . 

jasper’s sacrifices 

MR. GREWGIOUS EXPERIENCES A NEW SENSATION 
UP THE RIVER ....... 

SLEEPING IT OFF 


PAGE 

397 

423 

443 

455 

483 

517 

525 

543 

557 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES 


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FACSIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 


A 

TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHARLES DICKENS. 


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. K. BROWNE 


c 

LONDON . 

CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY; 

AND AT THE OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND, 

11, WELLINGTON STREET NORTH. 

MPCCCLIX 


FACSIMILE OP THE WKAPPER TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION 



CHARLES DICKENS 


WITH 

ILLUSTRATIONSIBY H. K. BROWNE, 


No. I. 


JUNE 


Price Is. 


LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 

AGENTS : J. MENZIES, EDINBTOOH ; M0KRAY AND SON, GLASGOW ; J, m’GLASHAN AND GILL, DUBLIN. 


^ The Author reserves the right of Translation. 





FACSIMILE OF VIGNETTE TITLE-PAGE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION 



. . . . . 40 

li o K ^ oy< : 


k TA I4 £ 


© 0 T 0 ll S 


Charles Bick&ms 


CtiAPMiN & Itl ALE/ , 193 , PlCCADJliUy 


INTRODUCTION. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

The concluding number of Little Dorrit was published in 
April, 1857, and in January, 1858, Charles Dickens already 
found himself being drawn towards the beginning of a new 
book. The process of incubation, so to say, is so closely 
described in his own letters of this time that the account of 
it may be given in his own words. On the 27th of January 
he wrote : — 

“ Growing inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort are upon 
me sometimes to fall to work on a new book. Then I think I had 
better not worry my worried mind yet awhile. Then I think it 
would be of no use if I did, for I couldn’t settle to one occupation. 
And that’s all.” Later, he wrote : “ If I can discipline my thoughts 
into the channel of a story, I have made up my mind to get to 
work on one : always supposing that I find myself, on the trial, 
able to do well. Nothing whatever will do me the least ‘ good ’ in 
the way of shaking the strong possession of change impending 
over us that every day makes stronger; but if I could work on 
with some approach to steadiness, through the summer, the anxious 
toil of a new book would have its neck well broken before begin- 
ning to publish, next October or November. Sometimes I think 
I may continue to work ; sometimes, I think not. What do 
you say to the title, One of these DaysV’ This title did not 
improve on acquaintance, and, after six weeks, he wrote again: 
“What do you think of this name for my story — Buried Alive? 
Does it seem too grim ? or. The Thread of Gold ? or, The Doctor 
of Beauvais ? ” 

t 

It was not until the 11th of March, 1859, that he was 
able to write : This is merely to certify that I have got 
exactly the name for the story that is wanted ; exactly what 
will fit the opening to a T, — A Tale of Tv:o Cities. Also, 
that I have struck out a rather original and bold idea. 
That is, at the end of each month to publish the monthly 
part in the green cover, with the two illustrations, at the 

xxiii 


XXIV 


INTRODUCTION. 


old shilling. . . . My American ambassador pays a thou- 
sand pounds for the first year, for the privilege of repub- 
lishing in America one day after we publish here. Not 
bad?” In July, he wrote: ‘^1 have been getting on in 
health very slowly and through irksome botheration enough. 
But I think I am round the corner. This cause — and the 
heat — has tended to my doing no more than hold my 
ground, my old month’s advance, with the Tale of Two 
Cities. The small portions thereof drive me frantic ; but I 
think the tale must have taken a strong hold. The run 
upon our monthly parts is surprising, and last month we 
sold 35,000 back numbers. A note I have had from Carlyle 
about it has given me especial pleasure.” In later years, by 
the way, Charles Dickens used to say that, while he was 
engaged on the preliminary work on the Tale of Tieo Cities,^ 
he asked Carlyle for the loan of a few such authorities as 
might be useful for his purpose, and promptly received from 
the historian of the Trench Beyolution two cartloads of 
books ! 

Equally clear and equally interesting, is the description 
of the objects Charles Dickens had in view, and of his 
methods of carrying them into effect, which is also con- 
tained in many letters which’^were written during the prog- 
ress of the book, and which may also be quoted here. To 
Mr. Forster he wrote on the 25th of August, 1859 : I have 
written and begged the All the Year Round publisher to 
send you directly four weeks’ proofs beyond the current 
number, that are in type. I hope you will like them. Noth- 
ing but the interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striv- 
ing with the difficulty of the forms of treatment, nothing in 
the mere way of money, I mean, could repay the time and 
trouble of the incessant condensation. But I set myself the 
little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every 
chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story 
itself should express, more than they should express them- 
selves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I have 
fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the 
bestiality^ that is written under that pretence, pounding 
the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own 


1 Sic in orig. Mr. Forster, quoting this letter in his Life, altered this 
rather strong expression to “ odious stuff,” for what reason, or with what 
authority, it is not easy to see. The biographer’s undoubted right to oiuit, 
in the exercise of his discretion, does not by any means justify the actual 
alteration of words and expressions. 


INTRODUCTION^ xxv 

interests out of them. If you could have read the story all 
at once, I hope you wouldn’t have stopped half way.” 

The following extracts from a letter to Bulwer, dated the 
5th of J une, 1860, are also full of interest : — 

“ I am very much interested and gratified by your letter con- 
cerning A Tale of Two Cities. I do not quite agree with you on 
two points, but that is no deduction from my pleasure. 

“ In the first place, although the surrender of the feudal privi- 
leges (on a motion seconded by a nobleman of great rank) was the 
occasion of a sentimental scene, I see no reason to doubt, but on 
the contrary, many reasons to believe, that some of these privileges 
had been used to the frightful oppression of the peasant, quite as 
near to the time of the Revolution as the doctor’s narrative, which, 
you will remember, dates long before the Terror. And surely 
when the new philosophy was the talk of the salons and the slang 
of the hour, it is not unreasonable or unallowable to suppose a 
nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time 
going out, as his nephew represents the time coming in ; as to the 
condition of the peasant in France generally at that day, I take it 
that if anything be certain on earth it is certain that it was intol- 
erable. No ex post facto inquiries and provings by figures will hold 
water, surely, against the tremendous testimony of men living at 
the time. 

“ There is a curious book printed*at Amsterdam, written to make 
out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal dictionary- 
like minuteness, scattered up and down the pages of which is full 
authority for my marquis. This is Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. 
Rousseau is the authority for the peasant’s shutting up his house 
when he had a bit of meat. The tax-taker was the authority for 
the wretched creature’s impoverishment. 

“I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting that 
canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such 
a case as Madame Defarge’s death. Where the accident is insepa- 
rable from the passion and emotion of the character, where it is 
strictly consistent with the whole design, and arises out of some 
culminating proceeding on the part of the character which the 
whole story has led up to, it seems to me to become, as it were, an 
act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is 
quite another question) to bring about that catastrophe, I have 
the positive intention of making that half-comic intervention a 
part of the desperate woman’s failure, and of opposing that mean 
death — instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she 
wouldn’t have minded — to the dignity of Carton’s wrong or 
right; this was the design and seemed to be in the fitness of 
things.” 


Mr. Forster, oddly enough, quotes a letter reply to 
some objections, of which the principal were a doubt if the 


XXVI 


INTRODUCTION. 


feudal cruelties came sufficiently within the date of the 
action to justify his use of them, and some question as to 
the manner of disposing of the chief revolutionary agent 
in the plot/^ which varies in so few respects from this 
letter to Bulwer as to make it clear that it is, in fact, 
the same thing; while the differences are quite sufficient, 
here and there, to raise the question whether Mr. Forster 
may not once more have been using to excess his dis- 
cretion in the way of alteration. Possibly, however, he 
quoted from a draft of the letter, and not from the docu- 
ment itself. 

The first number of All the Year Round, which was dated 
the 30th of April, 1859, contained the opening chapters of 
A Tale of Two Cities, and its conclusion was published in 
number thirty-one, dated the 26th of November in the same 
year. Of the monthly parts — which contained frontispiece, 
vignette title-page, and fourteen illustrations by Hablot K. 
Browne — the first was dated June, 1859, and the last (parts 
seven and eight being bound together) was published in 
December of that year. The complete book, bound in cloth, 
was published at nine shillings. The monthly parts were 
contained in green wrappers with a design by Hablot 
Browne, which, it must be admitted, was not one of that 
artist’s happiest efforts. It is characteristic, by the way, of 
the difficulties in the way of arriving at accuracy in matters 
of fact from books that Mr. Dexter, one of the best known 
of the bibliographers of Charles Dickens, describes the 
wrapper as ^^blue.” The colour has faded considerably, it 
is true, and has become difficult to identify with certainty ; 
but, in one of the letters I have quoted above, the author 
himself describes it as green, and green it no doubt was, 
originally, whatever it may have become in some copies in 
course of time. These eight monthly parts have grown very 
scarce in their original state, and figure among the fancy ” 
prices of Dickens’s collectors. 

Facsimiles of the wrapper, frontispiece, and vignette title- 
page are given at the beginning ; and while it may be noted 
that the Tale of Two Cities was the last of Charles Dickens’s 
books which was illustrated by Hablot Browne, it may be 
added, without disparagement of the distinguished artists 
who succeeded him, that no one — except, in two or three 
instances, George Cruikshank — has ever succeeded quite so 
well as ^^Phiz” in catching what may be called the true 
Dickens tone of the books. 


INTRODUCTION. xxvii 

The dedication was as follows : — 

THIS TALE IS INSCRIBED 
TO 

THE LORD JOHN RUSSELL 
IN REMEMBRANCE 
OF 

MANY PUBLIC SERVICES 
AND , 

PRIVATE KINDNESSES. 


The Preface ran as follows : — 

When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie 
Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main 
idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody 
it in my own person ; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of 
mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observ- 
ant spectator, with particular care and interest. 

As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself 
into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had com- 
plete possession of me ; I have so far verified what is done and 
suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered 
it all myself. 

Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the 
condition of the French people before or during the Revolution, 
it is truly made on the faith of the most trustworthy witnesses. 
It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and 
picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no 
one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s 
wonderful book. 

Tavistock House, London, 

November, 1859. 


The original manuscript of A Tale of Two Cities is at 
South Kensington. 

The dramatic interest of A Tale of Two Cities was so 
strong, and its stage possibilities so tempting, that it is not 
surprising that the idea of founding a play on the book 
should have occurred to its author, but it is a little strange 
that he should have looked to the French Theatre for its 
production. That he did so, seriously enough, is evidenced 


INTRODUCTION. 


xxviii 

by the following letters addressed to Regnier, the distin- 
guished actor of the Comedie Frangaise. 


' Gad’s Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent, 

Saturday, Oct. 15th, 1859. 

My dear Regnier, 

You will receive by railway parcel the proof sheets of a story of 
mine, that has been for some time in progress in my weekly jour- 
nal, and that will be published in a complete volume about tlie 
middle of November. Nobody but Forster has yet seen the latter 
portions of it, or will see them until they are published. I want 
you to read it for two reasons. Firstly, because I hope it is the 
l3est story I have written. Secondly, because it treats of a very 
remarkable time in France ; and I should very much like to know 
what you think of its being dramatised for a French theatre. If 
you should think it likely to be done, I should be glad to take 
some steps towards having it well done. The story is an extraor- 
dinary success here, and I think the end of it is certain to make 
a still greater sensation. 

Don’t trouble yourself to write to me, mon ami, until you shall 
have had time to read the proofs. Remember they are proofs, and 
private ; the latter chapters will not be before the public for five or 
six weeks to come. 

With kind regards to Madame Regnier, in which my daughters 
and their aunt unite, 

Believe me, ever faithfully yours. 

P.S. — The story (I dare say you have not seen any of it yet) is 
called A Tale of Two Cities. 

Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London, W.C. 

Wednesday, Nov. 16th, 1859. 

My dear Regnier, 

I send you ten thousand thanks for your kind and explicit 
letter. What I particularly wished to ascertain from you was 
whether it is likely the Censor would allow such a piece to be 
played in Paris. In the case of its being likely, then I wished to 
have the piece as well done as possible, and would even have pro- 
posed to come to Paris to see it rehearsed. But I very much 
doubted whether the general subject would not be objectionable 
to the Government, and what you write with so much sagacity 
and with such care convinced me at once that its representation 
would be prohibited. Therefore I altogether abandon and relin- 
quish the idea. But I am just as heartily and cordially obliged to 
you for your interest and friendship, as if the book had been 
turned into a play five hundred times. I again thank you ten 
thousand times, and am quite sure that you are right. I only 
hope you will forgive my causing you so much trouble, after your 
hard work. . . . 

I am ever your attached and faithful friend. 


INTRODUCTION. 


XXIX 


Although Charles Dickens seems, after this, altogether to 
have given up any idea of dramatising the book himself, he 
threw himself by-and-bye with the utmost ardour into the re- 
hearsals of the play, in a prologue and two acts, which Tom 
Taylor arranged, and which was most successfully produced 
at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on Monday, the 30th of 
January, 1860, under the management of Madame Celeste. 
How much of the play which was eventually acted was Tom 
Taylor’s, and how much of it was due to the suggestions 
and alterations of the original author who, in the words of 
the playbill, ^^in the kindest manner superintended the 
production of the piece,” is not made clear by the play itself 
as published in No. 661 of Lacy’s Acting Edition. But 
I know — for I attended several of the rehearsals — that 
if the play had been his very own,” my father could not 
have worked harder at it. He had his reward in the great 
success of the drama, which was greatly assisted' by the 
admirable performances of Walter Lacy as the Marquis de 
St. Evremonde, and of Madame Celeste as Madame Defarge 

— the latter one of the most effective and lifelike pictures 
from the Dickens dramatic gallery that I can recall to my 
recollection. 

Several other versions of the story have occupied the 
stage from time to time, but I have not been able to find 
that any of them have been published, except one, in a pro- 
logue and three acts, adapted by Henry I. Eivers. This, 
which was embellished with a portrait of Madame Celeste 

— not in the least like her, by the way — was comprised in 
Davidson’s Actable Drama, in continuation of Cumberland’s 
plays, published by Davidson, Peter’s Hill, London. It is, 
perhaps, principally worthy of note by reason of the extreme 
ingenuity with which the author succeeded in destroying all 
the point of the story, by doing away with Carton’s self- 
sacrifice and guillotining Barsad to save Darnay — a perfect 
triumph of absurdity. 

CHARLES DICKENS 


THE YOUNGER. 






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A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

3fn Etjrcc Boofts. 

BOOK THE FIRST .— TO LIFE. 


CHAPTER I. • 

THE PERIOD. 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the 
age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of 
belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, 
it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was 
the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing 
before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going 
direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the 
present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its 
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of 
comparison only. 

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain 
face, on the throne of England ; there were a king with a large 
jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In 
both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State 
preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled 
for ever. 

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and 
seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at 
that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently 
attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a pro- 
phetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime 
appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the 
swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane 
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out 
its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernatu- 


2 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


rally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in 
the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown 
and People, from a congress of British subjects in America : which, 
strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race 
than any communications yet received through any of the chickens 
of the Cock-lane brood. 

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than 
her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smooth- 
ness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the 
guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, 
with such humape achievements as sentencing a youth to have his 
hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned 
alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to 
a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a 
distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, 
rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing 
trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the 
Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make 
a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible 
in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some 
tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered 
from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic 
mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the 
Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumlDrils of the 
Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they 
work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they 
went about with muffled tread : the rather, forasmuch as to enter- 
tain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and 
traitorous. 

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and pro- 
tection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by 
armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself 
every night ; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of 
town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses 
for security ; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman 
in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow- 
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” 
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away ; the mail was 
waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then 
got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the 
failure of his ammunition : ” after which the mail was robbed in 
peace ; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was 
made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, 
who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue ; 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


3 


prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and 
the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded 
with rounds of shot and ball ; thieves snipped off diamond crosses 
from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms ; musketeers 
went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob 
fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and 
nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common 
way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever 
w’orse than useless, was in constant requisition ; now, stringing up 
long rows of miscellaneous criminals ; now, hanging a housebreaker 
on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday ; now, burning people 
in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets 
at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an 
atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had 
robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence. 

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and 
close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and 
seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the 
Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those 
other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, 
and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the 
year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their 
Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures — the creatures of this 
chronicle among the rest — along the roads that lay before them. 


CHAPTER II. 

THE MAIL. 

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in 
November, before the first of the persons with whom this history 
has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover 
mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the 
mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did ; 
not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under 
the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the 
mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three 
times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across 
the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. 
Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, 
had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise 
strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are 


4 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


endued with Reason ; and the team had capitulated and returned 
to their duty. 

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their 
way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between 
whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As 
often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with 
a wary “ Wo-ho ! so-ho-then ! ” the near leader violently shook his 
head and everything upon it — like an unusually emphatic horse, 
denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the 
leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passen- 
ger might, and was disturbed in mind. 

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed 
in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and 
finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow 
way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread 
one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was 
dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach- 
lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road ; and the 
reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all. 

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill 
by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheek- 
bones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the 
three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the 
other two was like ; and each was hidden under almost as many 
wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, 
of his two com^nions. In those days, travellers were very shy of 
being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might 
be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when 
every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in “ the 
Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable 
nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the 
guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in 
November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumber- 
ing up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch be- 
hind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on 
the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the 
top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum 
of cutlass. 

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard 
suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and 
the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was 
sure of nothing but the horses ; as to which cattle he could with 
a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that 
they were not fit for the journey. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


5 


“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull 
and you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble 
enough to get you to it ! — Joe ! ” 

“ Halloa ! ” the guard replied. 

“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?” 

“ Ten minutes, good, past eleven.” 

“ My blood 1 ” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “ and not atop of 
Shooter’s yet ! Tst ! Yah I Get on with you 1 ” 

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided 
negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses 
followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the 
jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They had 
stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close company with 
it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to 
another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he 
would have put himself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as 
a highwayman. 

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The 
horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the 
wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passen- 
gers in. 

“ Tst ! Joe f” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking 
down from his box. 

“ What do you say, Tom ? ” 

They both listened. 

“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.” 

“ I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard„leavmg his 
hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “ Gentlemen ! 
In the king’s name, all of you I ” 

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and 
stood on the offensive. 

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, 
getting in ; the two other passengers were close behind him, and 
about to follow. He remained on the step, half in the coach and 
half out of; they remained in the road below him. They all 
looked from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard to the 
coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the guard 
looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and 
looked back, without contradicting. 

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and 
labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it 
very quiet indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a 
tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. 
The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard ; 


6 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of people 
out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quick- 
ened by expectation. . 

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the 
hill. 

“So-ho !” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “ Yo 
there ! Stand ! I shall fire ! ” 

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and 
floundering, a man’s voice called from the mist, “ Is that the 
Dover mail ? ” 

“ Never you mind what it is ! ” the guard retorted. “ What are 
you?” 

“ Is that the Dover mail ? ” 

“ Why do you want to know ? ” 

“ I want a passenger, if it is.” 

“ What passenger ? ” 

“ Mr. Jarvis Lorry.” 

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. 
The guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him 
distrustfully. 

“ Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the 
mist, “because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set 
right in your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer 
straight.” 

“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly 
quavering speech. “ Who wants me ? Is it Jerry ? ” 

(“I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard 
to himself. “ He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”) 

“Yes, Mr. Lorry.” 

“ What is the matter ? ” 

“ A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.” 

“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Loriy, getting down 
into the road — assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by 
the other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the 
coach, shut the door, and pulled up the window. “ He may come 
close ; there’s nothing wrong.” 

“ I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ’Nation sure of that,” 
said the guard, in grufi* soliloquy. “ Hallo you ! ” 

“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than 
before. ^ 

“Come on at a footpace ! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got 
holsters to that saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh 
’em. For I’m a devil at a quick mistake, and when I make one it 
takes the form of Lead. So now let’s look at you.” 



J 


TTTE MAir 





8 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddy- 
ing mist, and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger 
stood. The rider stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, 
handed the passenger a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was 
blown, and both horse and rider were covered with mud, from the 
hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man. 

“ Guard ! ” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business 
confidence. 

The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his 
raised blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horse- 
man, answered curtly, “ Sir.” 

‘‘ There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. 
You must know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris 
on business. A crown to drink. I may read this ? ” 

“If so be as you’re quick, sir.” 

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and 
read — first to himself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for 
Mam’selle.’ It’s not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my 
answer was, eecalled to life.” 

Jerry started in his saddle. “ That’s a Blazing strange answer, 
too,” said he, at his hoarsest. 

“ Take that message back, and they will know that I received 
tliis, as well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good 
night.” 

With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got 
in ; not at all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expe- 
ditiously secreted their watches and purses in their boots, and were 
now making a general pretence of being asleep. With no more 
definite purpose than to escape the hazard of originating any other 
kind of action. 

d^e coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist 
closing round it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced 
his blunderbuss in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of 
its contents, and having looked to the supplementary pistols that 
he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in 
which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a 
tinder-box. For he was furnished with that completeness that if 
the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occa- 
sionally happen, he had only to shut himself up inside, keep the 
flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get a light wdth toler- 
able safety and ease (if he were lucky) in five minutes. 

“ Tom ! ” softly over the coach roof. 

' “ Hallo, Joe.” 

“ Did you hear the message ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


9 


“ I did, Joe.” 

“ What did you make of it, Tom ? ” 

“ Nothing at all, Joe.” 

“That’s a coinadence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the 
same of it myself.” 

Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted mean- 
while, not only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from 
his face, and shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be 
capable of holding about half a gallon. After standing with the 
bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail 
were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, 
he turned to walk down the hill. 'p 

“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t 
trust your fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse 
messenger, glancing at his mare. “ ‘ Recalled to life.’ * That’s 
a Blazing strange message. 'Much of that wouldn’t do for you, 
Jerry ! I say, Jerry ! You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if re- 
calling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry ! ” 


CHAPTER III. 

THE NIGHT SHADOWS. 

A woNDEEFUL fact to reflect upon, that every human creature 
is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every 
other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, 
that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own 
secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own 
secret ; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of 
breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart 
nearest it ! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is 
referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book 
that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can 
I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as 
momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried 
treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the 
>)-: k ml * hut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had 
' O ld b' !.• a /.i.j . It was appointed that the water should be locked 
1’, •ill 0. t tjMst, when the light was playing on its surface, and I 
! >(*(1 i,; ‘ -m ranee on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour 
i ’“.‘ul, luy iove, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexo- 
1 f: > mho; io^ and perpetuation of the secret that was always 
i tir;t '.ality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s 


10 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I 
pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants 
are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them? 

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the 
messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the 
King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in Lon- 
don. So with the three passengers shut up in the narrow compass 
of one lumbering old mail coach ; they were mysteries to one an- 
other, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, 
or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between 
him and the next. 

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often 
at ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep 
his own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had 
eyes that assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface 
black, with no depth in the colour or form, and much too near to- 
gether — as if they were afraid of being found out in something, 
singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister expression, 
under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a 
great muffler for the ehin and throat, which descended nearly to 
the wearer’s knees. When he stopped for drink, he mo\ed this 
muffler with his left hand, only while he poured his liquor in with 
his right ; as soon as that was done, he muffled again. 

“No, Jerry, no ! ” said the messenger, harping on one tlieme as 
he rode. “It wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest 
tradesman, it wouldn’t suit your line of business ! Recalled — ! 
Bust me if I don’t think he’d been a drinking ! ” 

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, 
several times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on 
the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, stand- 
ing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, 
blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the 
top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of 
players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous 
man in the world to go over. 

While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the 
night watchman in his box at i;he door of Tellson’s Bank, bj Temple 
Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shad- 
ows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the mes- 
sage, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of her private 
topics of uneasiness. They si^emed to be numerous, for she shied 
at every shadow on the road. 

What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped 
upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


11 


whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in 
the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested. 

Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank pas- 
senger — with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did 
what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next pas- 
senger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a 
special jolt — nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little 
coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, 
and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and 
did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the 
chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes 
than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever 
paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms undei’ground, at 
Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were 
known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about 
them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the 
great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and 
strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them. 

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though 
the coach (in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an 
opiate) was always with him, there was another current of impres- 
sion that never ceased to run, all through the night. He was on 
his way to dig some one out of a grave. 

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves 
before him was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of 
the night did not indicate ; but they were all the faces of a man of 
five-and-forty by years, and they differed principally in the passions 
they expressed, and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted 
state. Pride, contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamen- 
tation, succeeded one another; so did varieties of sunken cheek, 
cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures. But the face was 
in the main one face, and every head was prematurely white. A 
hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this spectre : 

“ Buried how long ? ” 

The answer was always the same : “ Almost eighteen years.” 

“ You had abandoned all hope of being dug out ? ” 

“ Long ago.” 

“ You know that you are recalled to life ? ” 

“ They tell me so.” 

“ I hope you care to live 1 ” 

“ I can’t say.” 

“ Shall I show her to you ? Will you come and see her ? ” 

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. 
Sometimes the broken reply was, “ Wait ! It would kill me if I 


12 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


saw lier too soon.” Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of 
tears, and then it was, “ Take me to her.” Sometimes it was star- 
ing and bewildered, and then it was, “ I don’t know her. I don’t 
understand.” 

After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would 
dig, and dig, dig — now with a spade, now with a great key, now 
with his hands — to dig tliis wretched creature out. Got out at 
last, with earth hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly 
fall away to dust. The passenger would then start to himself, and 
lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his cheek. 

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on 
the moving patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the 
roadside retreating by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach 
would fall into the train of the night shadows within. The real 
Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real business of the past day, the 
real strong rooms, the real express sent after him, and the real mes- 
sage returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of them, the 
ghostly face would rise, and he would accost it again. 

“ Buried how long ? ” 

“Almost eighteen years.” 

“I hope you care to live?” 

“I can’t say.” 

Dig — dig — dig — until an impatient movement from one of the 
two passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw 
his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the 
two slumbering forms, until his mind ^ lost its hold of them, and 
they again slid away into the bank and the grave. 

“ Buried how long 1 

“ Almost eighteen years.” 

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out ?” 

“ Long ago.” 

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken — distinctly 
in his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life when 
the weary passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and 
found that the shadows of the night were gone. 

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There 
was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had 
been left last night when the horses were unyoked ; beyond, a quiet 
coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow 
still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, 
the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful. 

“ Eighteen years ! ” said the passenger, looking at the sun. 
“Gracious Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen 
years ! ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


13 


CHAPTER IV. 

THE PREPARATION. 

When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the 
forenoon, the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the 
coach-door as his custom was. He did it with some flourish of 
ceremony, for a mail journey from London in winter w^as an achieve- 
ment to congratulate an adventurous traveller upon. 

By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left to 
be congratulated : for the two others had been set down at their 
respective roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, 
with its damp and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscur- 
ity, was rather like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, 
shaking himself out of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy 
wrapper, flapping hat, and muddy legs, was rather like a larger 
sort of dog. 

“ There will be a packet to Calais, to-morrow, drawer 1 ” 

“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. 
The tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. 
Bed, sir?” 

“ I shall not go to bed till night ; but I want a bedroom, and a 
barber.” 

“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you 
please. Show Concord ! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to 
Concord. Pull oft' gentleman’s boots in Concord. (You will find 
a fine sea-coal fire, sir.) Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about 
there, now, for Concord ! ” 

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger 
by the mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily 
wrapped up from head to foot, the room had the odd interest for 
the establishment of the Royal George, that although but one kind 
of man was seen to go into it, all kinds and varieties of men came 
out of it. Consequently, another drawer, and two porters, and 
several maids and the landlady, were all loitering by accident at 
various points of the road between the Concord and the coffee-room, 
when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of 
clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large square 
cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to his 
breakfast. 

The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the 
gentleman in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, 
and as he sat, witli its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, 
he sat so still, that he might have been sitting for his portrait. 


14 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each 
knee, and a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped 
waistcoat, as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the 
levity and evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and 
was a little vain of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, 
and were of a fine texture ; his shoes and buckles, too, though 
plain, were trim. He wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, 
setting very close to his head : which wig, it is to be presumed, was 
made of hair, but which looked far more as though it were spun 
from filaments of silk or glass. His linen, though not of a fineness 
in accordance with his stockings, was as white as the tops of the 
waves that broke upon the neighbouring beach, or the specks of 
sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A face habitually sup- 
pressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the quaint wig by 
a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost their owner, in 
years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved 
expression of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his 
cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. 
But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson’s Bank 
were principally occupied with the cares of other people ; and per- 
haps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off 
and on. 

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his por- 
trait, Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast 
roused him, and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it : 

“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may 
come here at any time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, 
or she may only ask for a gentleman from Tellson’s Bank. Please 
to let me know.” 

“Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir?” 

“ Yes.” 

“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your 
gentlemen in their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt 
London and Paris, sir. A vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson 
and Company’s House.” 

“ Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.” 

“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, 
I think, sir ? ” 

“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we — since I — 
came last from France.” 

“ Indeed, sir ? That was before my time here, sir. Before our 
people’s time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that 
time, sir.” 

“ I believe so.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


15 


“ But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson 
and Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of 
fifteen years ago ? ” 

“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be 
far from the truth.” 

“ Indeed, sir ! ” 

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward 
from the table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to 
his left, dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying 
the guest while he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watch- 
tower. According to the immemorial usage of waiters in all ages. 

When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a 
stroll on the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid 
itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, 
like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea 
and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, 
and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and 
thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The 
air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one 
might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick 
people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was 
done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and 
looking seaward : particularly at those times when the tide made, 
and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business what- 
ever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was 
remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamp- 
lighter. 

As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had 
been at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, 
became again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts 
seemed to cloud too. When it was dark, and he sat before the 
coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, 
his mind was busily digging, digging, digging, in the live red coals. 

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals 
no harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of 
work. Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured 
out his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of 
satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh 
complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of 
wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard. 

He set down his glass untouched. “ This is Mam’selle ! ” said he. 

In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss 
Manette had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the 
gentleman from Tellson’s. 


16 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ So soon “? ” 

Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and 
required none then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentle- 
man from Tellson’s immediately, if it suited his pleasure and con- 
venience. 

The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to 
empty his glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd 
little flaxen wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s 
apartment. It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal ! 
manner with black horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. 
These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles on the 
table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every 
leaf; as if they were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, 
and no light to speak of could be expected from them until they 
were dug out. 

The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, pick- 
ing his way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss 
Manette to be, for the moment, in some adjacent room, until, 
having got past the two tall candles, he saw standing to receive 
him by the table between them and the fire, a young lady of not 
more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still holding her straw 
travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As his eyes rested on a 
short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue 
eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with 
a sir gular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), 
of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite 
one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed 
attention, though it included all the four expressions — as his eyes 
rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him, 
of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that 
very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the 
sea ran high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the 
surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a 
hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, 
were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of 
the feminine gender — and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette. 

“ Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young 
voice ; a little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed. 

“ I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of 
an earlier date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his 
seat. 

“ I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me 
that some intelligence — or discovery ” 

“ The word is not material, miss ; either word will do.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


17 


“ — respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I 
never saw — so long dead ” • 

Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards 
the hospital procession of negro cupids. As if they had any help 
for anybody in their absurd baskets ! 

“ — rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to 
communicate wuth a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be 
despatched to Paris for the purpose.” 

. “ Myself.” 

“As I was prepared to hear, sir.” 

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), 
with a pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older 
and wiser he was than she. He made her another bow. 

“ I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, 
by those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I 
should go to France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend 
who could go with me, I should esteem it highly if I might be per- 
mitted to place myself, during the journey, under that worthy gen- 
tleman’s protection. The gentleman had left London, but I think 
a messenger was sent after hitn to beg the favour of his waiting for 
me here.” 

“I -was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the 
charge. I shall be more happy to execute it.” 

“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It 
was told me by the Bank that the gentleman would explain .fp me 
the details of the business, and that I must prepare myself to find 
them of a surprising nature. I have done my best to prepare my- 
self, and I naturally have a strong and eager interest to know what 
they are.” 

“ Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes — I ” 

After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at 
the ears, 

“It is very difficult to begin.” 

He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The 
young forehead lifted itself into that singular expression — but it 
was pretty and characteristic, besides being singular — and she 
raised her hand, as if with an involuntary action she caught at, or 
stayed some passing shadow. 

“ Are you quite a stranger to me, sir h ” 

“ Am I not ? ” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them 
outwards with an argumentative smile. 

Between the eyebrows and just over -the little feminine nose, 
the line of which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the 
expression deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the 

c % 


18 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


chair by which she had hitherto remained standing. He watched 
her as she mused, and the moment she raised her eyes again, went 
on ; 

“ In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than 
address you as a young English lady. Miss Manette ? ” 

“ If you please, sir.” 

“ Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business 
charge to acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me 
any more than if I was a speaking machine — truly, I am not much 
else. I will, with your leave, relate to you, miss, the story of one 
of our customers.” 

“ Story ! ” 

He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when 
he added, in a hurry, “Yes, customers ; in the banking business 
we usually call our connection our customers. He was a French 
gentleman ; a scientific gentleman ; a man of great acquirements — 
a Doctor.” 

“Not of Beauvais ? ” 

“ Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, 
the gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your 
father, the gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of 
knowing him there. Our relations were business relations, but 
confidential. I was at that time in our French House, and had 
been — oh ! twenty years.” 

“At that time — I may ask, at what time, sir 1 ” 

“ I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married — an English 
lady — and I whs one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs 
of many other French gentlemen and French families, were entirely 
in Tellson’s hands. In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee 
of one kind or other for scores of our customers. These are 
mere business relations, miss ; there is no friendship in them, no 
particular interest, nothing like sentiment. I have passed from one 
to another, in the course of my business life, just as I pass from 
one of our customers to another in the course of my business day ; 
in short, I have no feelings ; I am a mere machine. To go on ” 

“ But this is my father’s story, sir ; and I begin to think ” — 
the curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him — 
“ that when I was left an orphan through my mother’s surviving 
my father only two years, it was you who 'brought me to England. 
I am almost sure it was you.” 

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly ad- 
vanced to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. 
He then conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, 
and, holding the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


19 


by turns to rub his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he 
said, stood looking down into her face while she sat looking up 
into his. » 

“ Miss Manette, it was I. And you will see how truly I spoke 
of myself just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the 
relations I hold with my fellow-creatures are mere business rela- 
tions, when you reflect that I have never seen you since. No ; 
you have been the ward of Tellson’s House since, and I have been 
busy with the other business of Tellson’s House since. Feelings ! 
I have no time for them, no chance of them. I pass my whole 
life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.” 

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, 
Mr. Lorry flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands 
(which was most unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its 
shining surface was before), and resumed his former attitude. 

“ So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your 
regretted father. Now comes the difference. If your father had 
not died when he did Don’t be frightened ! How you start ! ” 

She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her 
hands. 

“Praj’’,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left 
hand from the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fin- 
gers that clasped him in so violent a tremble : “pray control your 
agitation — a matter of business. As I was saying ” 

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and 
began anew : 

“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he 
had suddenly and silently disappeared ; if he had been spirited 
away; if it had, not been difficult to guess to what dreadful- place, 
though no art could trace him ; if he had an enemy in some com- 
patriot who could exercise a privilege that I in my own time have 
known the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across 
the water there.; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank 
forms for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison 
for any length of time ; if his wife had implored the king, the 
queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite 
in vain ; — then the history of your father would have been the 
history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.” ■ 

“ I entreat you to tell me more, sir.” 

“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?” 

“ I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at 
.this moment.” 

‘ “You speak collectedly, and you — are collected. That’s good ! ” 
(Though his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “ A matter 


20 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


of business. Regard it as a matter of business — business that 
must be done. Now if this doctor’s wife, though a lady of great 
courage and spirit, had suffered so intensely from this cause before 
her little child was born ” 

“The little child was a daughter, sir.” 

‘ ‘ A daughter. A — a — matter of business — don’t be distressed. 
Miss, if the poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little 
child was born, that she came to the determination of sparing the 
poor child the inheritance of any part of the agony she had known 
the pains of, by rearing her in the belief that her father was dead 

No, don’t kneel ! In Heaven’s name why should you kneel 

to me ! ” 

“ For the truth. 0 dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth ! ” 

“A — a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I 
transact business if I am confused 1 Let us be clear-headed. If 
you could kindly mention now, for instance, what nine times nine- 
pence are, or how many shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so 
encouraging. I should be so much more at my ease about your 
state of mind.” 

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when 
he had very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased 
to clasp his wrists were so much more steady than they had been, 
that she communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry. 

“ That’s right, that’s right. Courage ! Business ! You have 
business before you ; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother 
took this course with you. And when she died — I believe broken- 
hearted — having never slackened her unavailing search for your 
father, she left you, at two years old, to grow to be blooming, 
beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you of living in 
uncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart out in prison, 
or wasted there through many lingering years.” 

As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on 
the flowing golden hair ; as if he pictured to himself that it might 
have been already tinged with grey. 

“You know that your parents had no great possession, and 
that what they had was secured to your mother and to you. There 
has been no new discovery, of money, or of any other property: 
but ” 

He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression 
in the forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and 
which was now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and 
liorror. 

“ But he has been — been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, 
it is too probable ; almost a wreck, it is possible ; thougli we will 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


21 


hope the best. Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the 
house of an old servant in Paris, and we are going there : I, to 
identify Ihm if I can : you, to restore him to life, love, duty, rest, 
comfort.” 

A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She 
said, in a low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it 
in a dream, 

“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost — not 
him ! ” 

Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “ There, 
there, there ! See now, see now ! The best and the worst are 
known to you, nMv. You are well on your way to the poor 
wronged gentleman, and, with a fair sea voyage, and a fair land 
journey, you will be soon at his dear side.” 

She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “ I have been 
free, I have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me ! ” 

“ Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as 
a wholesome means of enforcing her attention : “he has been found 
under another name ; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. 
It would be worse than useless now to inquire which ; worse than 
useless to seek to know whether he has been for years overlooked, 
or always designedly held prisoner. It would be worse than use- 
less now to make any inquiries, because it would be dangerous. 
Better not to mention the subject, anywhere or in any way, and to 
remove him — for a while at all events — out of France. Even I, 
safe as an Englishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are 
to French credit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about 
me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret 
service altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are 
all comprehended in the one line, ‘ Kecalled to Life ; ’ which may 
mean anything. But what is the matter ! She doesn’t notice a 
word I Miss Manette I ” 

Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, 
she sat under his hand, utterly insensible ; with her eyes open and 
fixed upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were 
carved or branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon 
his arm, that he feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her ; 
therefore he called out loudly for assistance without moving. 

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry 
observed to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be 
dressed in some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on 
her head a most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, 
and good measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, came running into 
the room in advance of the inn servants, and soon settled the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


l2 

y 

question of his detachment from the poor young lady, by laying a 
brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him flying back against 
the nearest wall. 

(“I really think this must be a man ! ” was Mr. Lorry’s breath- 
less reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.) 

“ "Why, look at you all ! ” bawled this flgure, addressing the inn 
servants. “ Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of stand- 
ing there staring at me ? I am not so much to look at, am I ? 
Why don’t you go and fetch things? I’ll let you know, if you 
don’t bring smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I" will.” 

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she 
softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and 
gentleness : calling her “my precious ! ” and “ my bird ! ” and spread- 
ing her golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and pare. 

“ And you in brown ! ” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. 
Lorry ; “ couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without 
frightening her to death ? Look at her, with her pretty pale face 
and her cold hands. Do you call that being a Banker ? ” 

Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard 
to answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much 
feebler sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having 
' banished the inn servants under the mysterious penalty of “ letting 
them know ” something not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, 
recovered her charge by a regular series of gradations, and coaxed 
her to lay her drooping head upon her shoulder. 

“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry. 

“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty ! ” 
“ I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy 
and humility, “ that you accompany Miss Manette to France ? ” 

“ A likely thing, too ! ” replied the strong woman. “ If it 'was 
ever intended that I should go across salt water, dp you suppose 
Providence would have cast my lot in an island ? ” 

This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry 
withdrew to consider it. 

^ CHAPTER V. 

THE WINE-SHOP. 

A LARGE cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the 
street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; 
the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it 
lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered 
like a walnut- shell. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


23 


All the people within reach had suspended their business, or 
their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, 
irregular «tones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, 
one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that 
approached them, had dammed it into little pools ; these were sur- 
rounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its 
size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands 
joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their 
shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their 
fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with 
little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs 
from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths ; 
others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran ; 
others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and 
there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new 
directions ; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed 
pieces of the cask, licking, and even chatnping the moister wine- 
rotted /fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to 
carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so 
much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been 
a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have 
believed in such a miraculous presence. 

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices — voices of men, 
women, and children — resounded in the street while this wine game 
lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playful- 
ness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable incli- 
nation on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, 
especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome em- 
braces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of 
hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone, 
and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into 
a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as sud- 
denly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw 
sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again ; the 
woman who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at 
which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved 
fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it ; men with 
bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged 
into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again ; 
and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural 
to it than sunshine. 

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow 
street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. 
It liad stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked 


24 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed 
the wood, left red marks on the billets ; and the forehead of the 
woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old 
rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy 
with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the 
mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a 
long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall 
with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees — Blood. 

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on 
the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many 
there. 

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a 
momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the 
darkness of it was heavy — cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, 
were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence — nobles of great 
power all of them ; but, most especially the last. Samples of a 
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in 
the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old 
people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every 
doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of 
a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them 
down, was the mill that grinds young people old ; the children had 
ancient faces and grave voices ; and upon them, and upon the grown 
faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, 
was the sigh. Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger 
was pushed out of the tall houses, 'in the wretched clothing that 
hung upon poles and lines ; Hunger was patched into them with 
straw and rag and wood and paper ; Hunger was repeated in eveiy 
fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed olf ; 
Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up 
from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of any- 
thing to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, 
written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread ; at 
the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered 
for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chest- 
nuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in 
every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some 
reluctant drops of oil. 

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding 
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets 
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of 
rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon 
them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was 
yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


25 


Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not 
wanting among them ; nor compressed lips, white with what they 
suppressed ; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows- 
rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs 
(and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illus- 
trations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, 
only the leanest scrags of meat ; the baker, the coarsest of meagre 
loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops, 
croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and 
were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in 
a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons ; but, the cutler’s 
knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were 
heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous. The crippling 
stones of the pavement, with their many little reservoirs of mud and 
water, had no footways, but broke off abruptly at the doors. 
The kennel, to make amends, ran down the middle of the street — 
when it ran at all : which was only after heavy rains, and then it 
ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, 
at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley ; 
at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, 
and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a 
sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were 
at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of tempest. 

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that 
region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness 
and hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on 
his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to 
flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not 
come yet ; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags 
of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, 
took no warning. 

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in 
its appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had 
stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking 
on at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said 
he, with a final shrug of the shoulders. “ The people from the 
market did it. Let them bring another.” 

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his 
joke, he called to him across the way : 

“ Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there ? ” 

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is 
often the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely 
failed, as is often the way with his tribe too. 

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said 


26 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


the wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest 
with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared 
over it. “ W^hy do you write in the public streets ? Is there — 
tell me thou — is there no other place to write such words in ? ” 

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps acci- 
dentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped 
it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down 
in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes 
jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an 
extremely, not to say^wolfishly practical character, he looked, under 
those circumstances. 

“ Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “ Call wine, wine ; and 
finish there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon 
the joker’s dress, such as it was — quite deliberately, as having 
dirtied the hand on his account ; and then recrossed the road and 
entered the wine-shop. 

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man 
of thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, 
although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one 
slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and 
his brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear any- 
thing more on his head than his own crisply-curling short dark hair. 
He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold 
breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, 
but implacable-looking, too ; evidently a man of a strong resolution 
and a set purpose ; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a 
narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the 
man. 

Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter 
as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his 
own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at any- 
thing, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, 
and great composure of manner. There was a character about 
Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she 
did qot often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckon- 
ings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive 
to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl 
twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her 
large ear-rings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it 
down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her 
right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said 
nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of 
cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined 
eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth. of a line, suggested to 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


27 


her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among 
the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while, he 
stepped over the way. 

The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until 
they rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were 
seated in a corner. Other company were there : two playing cards, 
two playing dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening 
out a short supply of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he 
took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a look to the young 
lady, “ This is our man.” 

“ What the devil do you do in that galley there ? ” said Monsieur 
Defarge to himself ; “I don’t know you.” 

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into 
discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at 
the counter. 

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur 
Defarge. “ Is all the spilt wine swallowed ? ” 

“ Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge. 

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame 
Defarge, picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another 
grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another 
line. , 

“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Mon- 
sieur Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the 
taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it 
not so, Jacques % ” 

“ It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned. 

At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame 
Defarge, still using her toothpick with profound composure, 
coughed another grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the 
breadth of another line. 

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his 
empty drinking vessel and smacked his lips. 

“ Ah ! So much the worse ! A bitter taste it is that such poor 
cattle always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, 
Jacques. Am I right, Jacques ? ” 

“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge. 

This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at 
the moment when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her 
eyebrows up, and slightly rustled in her seat. 

“ Hold then ! True ! ” muttered her husband. “ Gentlemen — 
my wife ! ” 

The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, 
with three flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bend- 


28 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


ing her head, and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in 
a casual manner round the wine-shop, took up her knitting with 
great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became absorbed 
in it. 

“ Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye 
observantly upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bach- 
elor-fashion, that you wished to see, and were inquiring for when I 
stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase 
gives on the little courtyard close to the left here,” pointing with 
his hand, “ near to the window of my establishment. But, now that 
I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show the 
way. Gentlemen, adieu ! ” 

They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Mon- 
sieur Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the 
elderly gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour 
of a word. 

“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped 
with him to the door. 

Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at 
the first word. Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply atten- 
tive. It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. 
The gentleman then beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, 
went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and 
steady eyebrows, and saw nothing. 

Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine- 
shop thus, joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he 
had directed his own company just before. It opened from a 
stinking little black courtyard, and was the general public en- 
trance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a great number of 
people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved 
staircase. Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of 
his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was a gentle 
action, but not at all gently done ; a very remarkable transfor- 
mation had come over him in a few" seconds. He had no good- 
humour in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had 
become a secret, angry, dangerous man. 

“ It is very high ; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.” 
Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they 
began ascending the stairs. 

“Is he alone *? ” the latter whispered. 

“ Alone ! God help him, who should be with him ! ” said the 
other, in the same low voice. 

“Is he always alone, then ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


29 


“ Of his own desire ? ” 

“ Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after 
they found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, 
at my peril be discreet — as he was then, so he is now.” 

“ He is greatly changed ? ” 

“ Changed ! ” 

The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his 
hand, and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could 
have been half so forcible. Mr. Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and 
heavier, as he and his two companions ascended higher and higher. 

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more 
crowded parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that 
time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. 
Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high build- 
ing — that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that 
opened on the general staircase — left its own heap of refuse on 
its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own win- 
dows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so 
engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and dep- 
rivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the 
two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through 
such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the 
way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his 
young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, 
Mr. Jarvis Loriy twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages 
was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs 
that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and 
sickly vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, 
tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neigh- 
bourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the 
summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise 
on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations. 

At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped 
for the third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper 
inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the 
garret story was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always 
going a little in advance, and always going on the side which 
Mr. Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked any question by 
the young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling in 
the pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key. 

“ The door is locked then, my friend ? ” said Mr. Lorry, surprised. 

“ Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge. 

“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so 
retired ? ” 


30 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge 
whispered it closer in his ear, and frowned heavily. 

“Why?” 

“ Why ! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would 
be frightened — rave — tear himself to pieces — die — come to I 
know not what harm — if his door was left open.” 

“ Is it possible ! ” exclaimed Mr. Lorry. 

“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a 
beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many 
other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done — 
done, see you ! — under that sky there, every day. Long live the 
Devil. Let us go on.” 

This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not 
a word of it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time 
she trembled under such strong emotion, and her face expressed 
such deep anxiety, and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. 
Lorry felt it incumbent on him to speak a word or two of reassur- 
ance. 

“ Courage, dear miss ! Courage ! Business ! The worst will 
be over in a moment ; it is but passing the room-door, and the 
worst is over. Then, all the good you bring to him, all the relief, 
all the happiness you bring to him, begin. Let our good friend 
here, assist you on that side. That’s well, friend Defarge. Come, 
now. Business, business ! ” 

They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and 
they were soon at. the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, 
they came all at once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent 
down close together at the side of a door, and who were intently 
looking into the room to which the door belonged, through some 
chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footsteps close at hand, 
these three turned, and rose, and showed themselves to be the three 
of one name who had been drinking in the wine-shop. 

“ I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur 
Defarge. “Leave us, good boys,; we have business here.” 

The three glided by, and went silently down. 

There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper 
of the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left 
alone, Mr. Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a little anger : 

“ Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette ? ” 

“ I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.” 

“Is that well?” 

“ I think it is well.” 

“ Who are the few ? How do you choose them ? ” 

“I choose them as real men, of my name — Jacques is my name 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


31 


— to whom the sight is likely to do good. Enough ; you are Eng- 
lish ; that is another thing. Stay there, if you please, a little 
moment.” 

With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and 
looked in through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head 
again, he struck twice or thrice upon the door — evidently with no 
other object than to make a noise there. With the same intention, 
he drew the key across it, three or four times, before he put it 
clumsily into the lock, and turned it as heavily as he could. 

The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked 
into the room and said something. A faint voice answered some- 
thing. Little more than a single syllable could have been spoken 
on either side. 

He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. 
Mr. Lorry got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and 
held her ; for he felt that she was sinking. 

“A — a — a — business, business ! ” he urged, with a moisture 
that was not of business shining on his cheek. “ Come in, come 
in ! ” 

“I 'am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering. 

“Ofit^ What?” 

“ I mean of him. Of my father.” 

Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckon- 
ing of their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook 
upon his shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. 
He sat her down just within the door, and held her, clinging to 
him. 

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, 
took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did, 
methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise 
as he could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a 
measured tread to where the window was. He stopped there, and 
faced round. 

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was 
dim and dark : for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a 
door in the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of 
stores from the street ; unglazed, and closing up the middle in two 
pieces, like any other door of French construction. To exclude 
the cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was 
opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion of light was 
admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first com- 
ing in, to see‘ anything ; and long habit alone could have slowly 
formed in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in 
such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the 


32 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


garret ; for, with his back towards the door, and his face towards 
the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at 
him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and- 
very busy, making shoes. 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE SHOEMAKER. 

“ Good day ! ” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the 
white head that bent low over the shoemaking. - 

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to 
the salutation, as if it were at a distance : 

“ Good day ! ” 

“You are still hard at work, I see ? ” 

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, 
and the voice replied, “Yes — lam working.” This time, a pair 
of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had 
dropped again. 

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was 
not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard 
fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, 
that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the 
last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely 
had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected 
the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak 
stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice 
underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, 
that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a 
wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a 
tone before lying down to die. 

Some minutes of silent work had passed : and the haggard eyes 
had looked up again : not with any interest or curiosity, but with 
a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the 
only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty. 

“ I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the 
shoemaker, “ to let in a little more light here. You can bear a 
little more ? ” 

The shoemaker stopped his work ; looked with a vacant air of 
listening, at the floor on one side of him ; then similarly, at the 
floor on the other side of him ; then, upward at the speaker. 

“ What did you say ? ” 

“You can bear a little more light 1 ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


33 


“ I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow 
of a stress upon the second word.) 

The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at 
that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, 
and showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, 
pausing in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of 
leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, 
raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright 
eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused 
them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused 
white hair, though they had been really otherwise ; but, they were 
naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt 
lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. 
He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his 
poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and 
air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow, that 
it would have been hard to say which was which. 

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the 
very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly 
vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure 
before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then 
on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound ; 
he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forget- 
ting to speak. 

“ Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day ? ” asked 
Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward. 

“ What did you say ? ” 

“ Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day ? ” 

“ I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.” 

But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over 
it again. 

Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the 
door. When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of 
Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed no surprise at see- 
ing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands 
strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of 
the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, 
and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action 
had occupied but an instant. ' 

“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge. 

“ What did you say ? ” 

“ Here is a visitor.” 

The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a 
hand from his work. 

D 


34 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Come ! ” said Defarge. “ Here is monsieur, who knows a 
well-made shoe when he sees one. Show him that shoe you are 
working at. Take it, monsieur.” 

Mr. Lorry took it in his hand. 

“ Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.” 

There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied : 

“ I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say ? ” 

“ I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s 
information ? ” 

“ It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is 
in the present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pat- 
tern in my hand.” He glanced at the shoe with some little passing 
touch of pride. 

“ And the maker’s name ? ” said Defarge. 

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the 
riglit hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the 
left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across 
his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without a moment’s 
intermission. The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into 
which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some 
very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of 
some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man. 

“ Did you ask me for my name ? ” 

“ Assuredly I did.” 

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.” 

“ Is that all ? ” 

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.” 

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to 
work again, until the silence was again broken. 

“You are not a shoemaker by trade ?” said Mr. Lorry, looking 
steadfastly at him. 

His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred 
the question to him ; but as no help came from that quarter, they 
turned back on the questioner when they had sought the ground. 

“ I am not a shoemaker by trade ? No, I was not a shoemaker 
by trade. I — I learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave 
to ” 

He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured 
changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, 
at last, to the face from which they had wandered ; when they 
rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper 
that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night. 

“ I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty 
after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.” 


A TALE or TWO CITIES. 


35 


As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from 
him, Mr. Lony said, still looking steadfastly in his face : 

“ Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?” 

The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at 
the questioner. 

“ Monsieur Manette ; ” Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s 
arm ; “do you remember nothing of this man ? Look at him. 
Look at me. Is there no old banker, no old business, no old ser- 
vant, no old time, rising in your mind. Monsieur Manette ? ” 

As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at 
Mr. Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an ac- 
tively intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually 
forced themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him. 
They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone ; 
but they had been there. And so exactly was the expression 
repeated on the fair young face of her who had crept along the 
wall to a point where she could see him, and where she now stood 
looking at him, with hands which at first had been only raised in 
frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out 
the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him, trem- 
bling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young 
breast, and love it back to life and hope — so exactly was the ex- 
pression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young 
face, that it looked as though it l^d passed like a moving light, 
from him to her. 

Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, 
less and less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought 
the ground and looked about him in the old way. Finally, with a 
deep long sigh, he took the shoe up, and resumed his work. 

“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a 
whisper. 

“ Yes ; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but 
I have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I 
once knew so well. Hush ! Let us draw further back. Hush ! ” 

She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the 
bench on which he sat. There was something awful in his uncon- 
sciousness of the figure that could have put out its hand and 
touched him as he stooped over his labour. 

Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, 
like a spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work. 

It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the 
instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that 
side of him which was not the side on which she stood. He had 
taken it up, and was stoopirg to work again, when his eyes caught 


36 


A talp: of two cities. 


the skirt of her dress. He raised them, and saw her face. The 
two spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion 
of her hand. She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife, 
though they had. 

He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips 
began to form some words, though no sound proceeded from them. 
By degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, lie 
was heard to say : 

“ What is this ? » 

With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands 
to her lips, and kissed them to him ; then clasped them on her 
breast, as if she laid his ruined head there. 

“You are not the gaoler’s daughter?” 

She sighed “No.” 

“ Who are you ? ” 

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the 
bench beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his 
arm. A strange thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly 
passed over his frame ; he laid the knife down softly, as he sat 
staring at her. 

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly 
pushed aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by 
little and little, he took it up and looked at it. In the midst of 
the action he went astray, and^ with another deep sigh, fell to work 
at his shoemaking. 

But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his 
shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if 
to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his 
hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of 
folded rag attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, 
and it contained a very little quantity of hair : not more than one 
or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off 
upon his finger. 

He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. 
“ It is the same. How can it be ! When was it ! How was it ! ” 

As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he 
seemed to become conscious that it was in hers too. He turned 
her full to the light, and looked at her. 

• “ She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I 

was summoned out — she had a fear of my going, though I had 
none — and when I was brought to the North Tower they found 
these upon my sleeve. ‘ You will leave me them ? They can never 
help me to escape in the body, though t hey may in the spirit.’ Those 
were the words I said. I remember tiiem very well.” 




THE SHOEMAKER 









38 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could 
utter it. But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to 
him coherently, though slowly. 

“ How was this ? — Was it you ? ” 

Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her 
with a frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his 
grasp, and only said, in a low voice, “ I entreat you, good gentle- 
men, do not come near us, do not speak, do not move ! ” 

“ Hark ! ” he exclaimed. “ Whose voice was that ? ” 

His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to 
his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as every- 
thing but his shoemaking did die out of him, and lie refolded his 
little packet and tried to secure it in his breast ; but he still looked 
as her, and gloomily shook his head. 

“No, no, no ; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. 
See what the prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this 
is not the face she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. 
She was — and He was — before the slow years of the North 
Tower — ages ago. What is your name, my gentle angel ? ” 

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her 
knees before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast. 

“ 0, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my 
mother was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, 
hard history. But I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell 
you here. All that I may tell you, here and now, is, that I pray 
to you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss me, kiss me ! 0 my dear, 
my dear ! ” 

His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed 
and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him. 

“If you hear in my voice — I don’t know that it is so, but I 
hope it is — if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice 
that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it ! If 
you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved 
head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep 
for it, weep for it ! If, when I hint to you of a Home that 'is 
before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with 
all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a tiome 
long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, w'eep 
for it ! ” 

She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her 
breast like a child. 

“ If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and 
that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to Eng- 
land to be at peace and at rest, I cause yofi to think of your useful 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


39 


life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for 
it, weep for it ! And if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of 
my father who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you learn 
that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his pardon 
for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake and 
wept all night, because the love of my poor mother hid his torture 
from me, weep for it, weep for it ! Weep for her, then, and for me ! 
Good gentlemen, thank God ! I feel his sacred tears upon my face, 
and his sobs strike against my heart. 0, see ! Thank God for us, 
thank God ! ” 

He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast : 
a sight so touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suf- 
fering which had gone before it, that the two beholders covered 
their faces. 

When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his 
heaving breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that 
must follow all storms — emblem to humanity, of the rest and 
silence into which the storm called Life must hush at last — they 
came forward to raise the father and daughter from the ground. 
He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy, 
worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head might 
lie upon her arm ; and her hair drooping over him curtained him 
from the light. 

“ If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. 
Lorry as he stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, 
“ all could be arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from 
the veiy door, he could be taken away ” 

“ But, consider. Is he fit for the journey ? ” asked Mr. Lorry. 

“ More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dread- 
ful to him.” 

“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and 
hear. “ More than that ; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, 
best out of France. Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses ? ” 

“That’s business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortek 
notice his methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, 
I had better do it.” 

“Then be so kind,” urged Mi§s Manette, “as to leave us here. 
You see how composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid 
to leave him with me now. Why should you be? If you will 
lock the door to secure us from interruption, I do not doubt that 
you will find him, when you come back, as quiet as you leave him. 
In any case, I will take care of him until you return, and then we 
will remove him straight.” 

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this 


40 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


course, and in favour of one of them remaining. But, as there 
were not only carriage and horses to be seen to, but travelling 
papers ; and as time pressed, for the day was drawing to an end, 
it came at last to their hastily dividing the business that was 
necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it. 

Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down 
on the hard ground close at the father’s side, and watched him. 
The darkness deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, 
until a light gleamed through the chinks in the wall. 

Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the 
journey, and had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and 
wrappers, bread and meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge 
put this provender, and the lamp he carried, on the shoemaker’s 
bench (there was nothing else in the garret but a pallet bed), and 
he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his feet. 

No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, 
in the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what 
had happened, whether he recollected what tliey had said to him, 
whether he knew that he was free, were questions which no sagacity 
could have solved. They tried speaking to him ; but, he was so 
confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright at his 
bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper with him no more. 
He had a wild, lost manner of occasionally clasping his head in his 
hands, that had not been seen in him before; yet, he had some 
pleasure in the mere sound of his daughter’s voice, and invariably 
turned to it when she spoke. 

In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under 
coercion, he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, 
and put on the cloak and other wrappings, that they gave him to 
wear. He readily responded to his daughter’s drawing her arm 
through his, and took — and kept — her hand in both his own. 

They began to descend ; Monsieur Defarge going first with the 
lamp, Mr. Lorry closing the little procession. They had not 
traversed many steps of the long main staircase when he stopped, 
and stared at the roof and round at the walls. 

“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming 
up here ? ” 

“ What did you say ? ” 

But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer 
as if she had repeated it. 

“ Remember ? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.” 

That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought 
from his prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard 
him mutter, “One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


41 


he looked about him, it evidently was for the strong fortress-walls 
which had long encompassed him. On their reaching the court- 
yard he instinctively altered his tread, as being in expectation of 
a drawbridge ; and when there was no drawbridge, and he saw the 
carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his daughter’s hand 
and clasped his head again. 

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at 
any of the many windows ; not even a chance passer-by was in the 
street. An unnatural silence and desertion reigned there. Only 
one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge — who 
leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing. 

The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed 
him, when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his ask- 
ing, miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. 
Madame Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would 
get them, and went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the 
courtyard. She quickly brought them down and handed them in ; 
— and immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post, knit- 
ting, and saw nothing. 

Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “ To the Barrier ! ” 
The postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the 
feeble over- swinging lamps. 

Under the over-swinging lamps — swinging ever brighter in the 
better streets, and ever dimmer in the worse — and by lighted shops, 
gay crowds, illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of 
the city gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. 
“ Your papers, travellers ! ” “ See here then. Monsieur the Officer,” 

said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, “ these 
are the papers of monsieur inside, with the wffiite head. They 

were consigned to me, with him, at the ” He dropped his voice, 

there was a flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them 
being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes con- 
nected with the arm looked, not an every day or an every night 
look, at monsieur with the white head. “It is well. Forward ! ” 
from the uniform. “ Adieu ! ” from Defarge. And so, under a 
short grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under 
the great grove of stars. 

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so‘ 
remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful 
whether their rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space 
where anything is suffered or done ; the shadows of the night were 
broad and black. All through the cold and restless interval, until 
dawn, they once more whispered in the ears of Mr. J arvis Lorry — 
sitting opposite the buried man who had been dug out, and wonder- 


42 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


ing what subtle powers were for ever lost to him, and what were 
capable of restoration — the old inquiry : 

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?” 

And the old answer : 

“ I can’t say.” 


THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK. 
















i 









v 


^4 




BOOK THE ^l^CO^T>.~THE aOLBEN 
THREAD. 


CHAPTER I. 

FIVE YEAES LATER. 

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even 
in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very 
small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old- 
fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners 
in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, 
proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were 
even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired 
by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would 
be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active 
weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. 
Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no 
light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, 
or Snooks Brothers’ might ; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven ! 

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the 
question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was 
much on a par with the Country ; which did very often disinherit 
its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had 
long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable. 

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant 
perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic 
obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s 
down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, 
with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque 
shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature 
by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower- 
bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier 
by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple 
Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing “the House,” you 

43 


44 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you 
meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its hands in 
its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. 
Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, 
particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when 
they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, 
as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was 
stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communi- 
cations corrupted its good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got 
into extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and 
fretted all the fat out of their parchments into the banking-house 
air. Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Bar- 
,mecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never 
^had a dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hun- 
dred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, 
or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror 
of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on 
Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of 
Abyssinia or 'Ashantee. 

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in 
vogue with all trades and professions, and not least of all with 
Tellson’s. Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not 
Legislation’s 1 Accordingly, the forger was put to Death ; the 
utterer of a bad note was put to Death ; the unlawful opener of a 
letter was put to Death ; the purloiner of forty shillings and six- 
pence was put to Death ; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, 
who made off with it, was put to Death ; the coiner of a bad shil- 
ling was put to Death ; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes 
in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death. Not that it did 
the least good in the way of prevention — it might almost have 
been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the reverse — but, 
it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, 
and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after. Thus, 
Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business, its contempo- 
raries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it 
had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed 
of, they would probably have excluded what little ligjit the ground 
floor had, in a rather significant manner. 

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, 
the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took 
a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere 
till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, 
until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. 
Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


45 


large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general 
weight of the establishment. 

Outside Tellson’s — never by any means in it, unless called in — 
was an odd-job-man, an occasional porter •^nd messenger, who served 
as the live sign of the house. He was newer absent during business 
hours, unless upon an errand, and then he was represented by his 
son : a grisly urchin of twelve, who was his express image. r.:ople 
understood that Tellson’s, in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job- 
man. The house had always tolerated some person in that capacity, 
and time and tide had drifted this person to the post. His sur- 
name was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing 
by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of 
Hounsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry. 

The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-3^ 
alley, Whitefriars : the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy 
March morning. Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. 
(Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as 
Anna Dominoes : apparently under the impression that the Chris- 
tian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who 
had bestowed her name upon it.) 

Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, 
and were but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of 
glass in it might be counted as one. But they were very decently 
kept. Early as it was, on the windy March morning, the room in 
which he lay abed was already scrubbed throughout ; and between 
the cups and saucers an inged for breakfast, and the lumbering deal 
table, a very clean whT 3 cloth was spread. 

Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a 
Harlequin at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, 
began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, 
with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. 
\A.t which juncture, he exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation : 

“ Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin ! ” 

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her 
knees in a corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show 
that she was the person referred to. 

“ What ! said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. 

“ You’re at it agin, are you ? ” 

After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a 
boot at the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and 
may introduce the odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher’s 
domestic economy, that, whereas he often came home after banking 
hours with clean boots, he often got up next morning to find the 
same boots covered with clay. 


46 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after miss- 
ing his mark — “ what are you up to, Aggerawayter ? ” 

“ I was only saying my prayers.” 

“ Saying your prayers ! You’re a nice woman ! What do you 
mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me ? ” 

“ I was not praying against you ; I was praying for you.” 

“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty 
with. Here ! your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going 
a praying agin your father’s prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful 
mother, you have, my son. You’ve got a religious mother, you 
have, my boy : going and flopping herself down, and praying that 
the bread-and-butter may be snatched out of the mouth of her 
only child.” 

i Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, 
turning to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of 
his personal board. 

“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. 
Cruncher, with unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of ^our 
prayers may be ? Name the price that you put ^our prayers at ! ” 

“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no 
more than that.” 

“ Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “ They 
ain’t worth much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, 
I tell you. I can’t aflbrd it. I’m not a going to be made unlucky 
by ^ou7' sneaking. If you must go flopping yourself down, flop in 
favour of your husband and child, and not in opposition to ’em. 
If I had had any but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy had had 
any but a unnat’ral mother, I might have made some money last 
week instead of being counterprayed and countermined and relig- 
iously circumwented into the worst of luck. B-u-u-ust me ! ” said 
Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting on his clothes, 
“ if I ain’t, what with piety and one bio wed thing and anoth-^^'^ 
been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil 
of a honest tradesman met with ! Young Jerry, dress yourself, 
roy boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother 
now and then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me 
a call. For, I tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I 
won’t be gone agin, in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney- 
coach, I’m as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is strained to that de- 
gree that I shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which 
was me and which somebody else, yet I’m none the better for it in 
pocket ; and it’s my suspicion that you’ve been at it from morning 
to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket, and 
I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now ! ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


47 


Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You’re re- 
ligious, too. You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the in- 
terests of your husband and child, would you ? Not you ! ” and 
throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the whirling grindstone of 
his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook himself to his boot-cleaning 
and his general preparation for business. In the meantime, his 
son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose 
young eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did, kept the 
required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor 
woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he 
made his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, 
mother. — Halloa, father ! ” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, 
darting in again with an undutiful grin. 

Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came 
to his breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with 
particular animosity. 

“ Now, Aggerawayter ! What are you up to? At it again? ” 

His wife explained that she had merely “ asked a blessing.” 

“ Don’t do it ! ” said Mr. Cruncher, looking about, as if he 
rather expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his 
wife’s petitions. “ I ain’t a going to be blest out of house and 
home. I won’t have my wittles blest off my table. Keep still ! ” 

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at 
a party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry 
Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over 
it like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine 
o’clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respect- 
able and business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural 
self with, issued forth to the occupation of the day. 

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite de- 
scription of himself as “ a honest tradesman.” His stock con- 
:oisted of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut 
down, which stool, young Jerry, walking at his father’s side, car- 
ried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that was 
nearest Temple Bar : where, with the addition of the first handful 
of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to keep 
the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the en- 
campment for the day. On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as 
well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar itself, — 
and was almost as ill-looking. 

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his 
three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tell- 
son’s, Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with 
young Jerry standing by him, when not engaged in making forays 


48 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


through the Bar, to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute 
description on passing boys who were small enough for his amiable 
purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other, looking 
silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street, with their two 
heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were, bore a 
considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys. The resemblance 
was not lessened by the accidental circumstance, that the mature 
Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the 
youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything 
else in Fleet-street. 

The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to 
Tellson’s establishment was put through the door, and the word 
was given : 

“ Porter wanted ! ” 

“ Hooray, father ! Here’s an early job to begin with ! ” 

Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated 
himself on the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the 
straw his father had been chewing, and cogitated. 

“ Al-ways rusty ! His Angers is al-ways rusty ! ” muttered 
young Jerry. “Where does my father get all that iron rust from? 
He don’t get no iron rust here ! ” 


CHAPTER II. 

A SIGHT. 

“ You know the Old Bailey, well, no doubt? ” said one of the old- 
est of clerks to Jerry the messenger. 

“ Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. 
“ I know the Bailey.” 

“ Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.” 

“ I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. 
Much better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the 
establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish 
to know the Bailey.” 

“ Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show 
the door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.” 

“ Into the court, sir ?” 

“ Into the court.” 

Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, 
and to interchange the inquiry, “ What do you think of this ? ” 

“ Am I to wait in the court, sir ? ” he asked, as the result of that 
conference. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


49 


“ I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to 
Mr. Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. 
Lorry’s attention, and show him where you stand. Then what 
you have to do, is, to remain there until he wants you.” 

“ Is that all, sir ? ” 

“ That’s all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is 
to tell him you are there.” 

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the 
note, Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came 
to the blotting-paper stage, remarked : 

“ I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning ? ” 

“ Treason ! ” 

“ That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “ Barbarous ! ” 

“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his sur- 
prised spectacles upon him. “It is the law.” 

“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough 
to kill him, but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.” 

“ Not at all,” returned the ancient clerk. “ Speak well of the 
law. Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave 
the law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.” 

“ It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said 
Jerry. “ I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a liv- 
ing mine is.” 

“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various^ 
ways of gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and * 
some of us have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.” 

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less in- 
ternal deference than he made an outward show of, “ You are a 
lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of 
his destination, and went his way. 

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside 
Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since 
attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most 
kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire 
diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and 
sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice 
himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once 
happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own 
doom as certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him. 
For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn- 
yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and 
coaches, on a violent passage into the other world : traversing some 
two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few 
good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be 

E 


50 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a 
wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one 
could foresee the extent ; also, for the whipping-post, another dear 
old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action ; 
also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment 
of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful 
mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Alto- 
gether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of 
the precept, that “ Whatever is is right ; ” an aphorism that would 
be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome conse- 
quence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong. 

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and 
down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accus- 
tomed to make his way quietly, the messenger found out the door 
he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it. For, 
people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they 
paid to see the play in Bedlam — only the former entertainment 
was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were 
well guarded — except, indeed, the social doors by which the crimi- 
nals got there, and those were always left wide open. 

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its 
hinges a very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze 
himself into court. 

“What’s onT’ he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found 
himself next to. 

“ Nothing yet.” 

“ What’s coming on ? ” 

“ The Treason case.” 

“ The quartering one, eh ? ” 

“ Ah ! ” returned the man, with a relish ; “ he’ll be drawn on a 
hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced 
before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and 
burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped ofl*, 
and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.” 

“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way 
of proviso. 

“ Oh ! they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “ Don’t you be 
afraid of that.” 

Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, 
whom he saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his 
hand. Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs : not 
far from a wigged gentleman, the prisoner’s counsel, who’ had a great 
bundle of papers before him : and nearly opposite another wigged 
gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose, whole attention, 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


61 


when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to 
be concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After some gruff 
coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry 
•attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for 
him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again. 

“ What’s he got to do with the case ? ” asked the man he had 
spoken with. 

“ Blest if I know,” said Jerry. 

“ What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may in- 
quire 1 ” 

“ Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry. 

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and 
settling down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the 
dock became the central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had 
been standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in, 
and put to the bar. 

Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked 
at the ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, 
rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained 
round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in 
back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him ; people on the floor 
of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before 
them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of him — 
stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see 
. every inch of him. Conspicuous among these latter, like an ani- 
mated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood : aiming at 
the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came 
along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, 
and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, 
and already broke upon the great windows behind him in an 
impure mist and rain. 

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of 
about five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sun- 
burnt cheek and a dark eye. His condition was that of a young 
gentleman. He was plainly dressed in black, or very dark grey, 
and his hair, which was long and dark, was gathered in a ribbon 
at the back of his neck ; more to be out of his way than for orna- 
ment. As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any 
covering 'of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered 
came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be 
stronger than the sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed, 
bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet. 

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed 
at, was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril 


52 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


of a less horrible , sentence — had there been a chance of any one of 
its savage details being spaVed — by just so much would he have 
lost in his fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so 
shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that 
was to be so butchered att l torn asunder, yielded the sensation. 
Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest, 
according to their several arts and powers of self-de^ceit, the inter- 
est was, at the root of it, Ogreish. 

Silence in the court ! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded 
Not Guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle 
and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, 
excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his 
having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted 
Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illus- 
trious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and 
going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excel- 
lent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, 
falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to 
the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, 
excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and 
North America. This much, Jerry, with his head becoming more 
and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge 
satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that 
the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, 
stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing 
in ; and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak. 

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally 
hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither 
flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. 
He was quiet and attentive ; watched the opening proceedings 
with a grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the 
slab of wood before him, so composedly, that they had not dis- 
placed a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court 
was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a pre- 
caution against gaol air and gaol fever. 

Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light 
down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been 
reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s 
together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable 
place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back 
its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some 
passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been 
reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, 
a change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


53 


across his face, he looked up ; and when he saw the glass his face 
I flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away. 

It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the 
court which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there 
sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, ^wo persons upon whom 
his look immediately rested ; so immediately, and so much to the 
changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon 
him, turned to them. 

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little 
more than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father ; 
a man of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute 
whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face : 
not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When 
this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were old ; but 
when it was stirred and broken up — as it was now, in a moment, 
on his speaking to his daughter — he became a handsome man, not 
past the prime of life. 

. His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as 
she sat by him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn 
close to him, in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the pris- 
oner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an engross- 
ing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of the 
accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and 
naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him were 
touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are they?” 

Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in 
his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers 
in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The 
crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to. the near- 
est attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed and 
passed back ; at last it got to J erry : 

“ Witnesses.” 

“ For which side ? ” 

“Against.” 

“ Against what side ? ” 

“ The prisoner’s.” 

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, 
recalled them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the 
man whose life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose 
to spin the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the 
scaffold. 


64 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER III. 

A DISAPPOINTMENT. 

Mr. Attorney-GtENERAL had to inform the jury, that the pris- 
oner before them, though young in years, was old in the treason- 
able practices which claimed the forfeit of his life. That this 
correspondence with the public enemy was not a correspondence of 
to-day, or of yesterday, or even of last year, or of the year before. 
That, it was certain the prisoner had, for longer than that, been in 
the habit of passing and repassing between France and England, on 
secret business of which he could give no honest account. That, 
if it were in the nature of traitorous ways to thrive (which happily 
it never was), the real wickedness and guilt of his business might 
have remained undiscovered. That Providence, however, had put 
it into the heart of a person who was beyond fear and beyond 
reproach, to ferret out the nature of the prisoner’s schemes, and, 
struck with horror, to disclose them to his Majesty’s Chief Secre- 
tary of State and most honourable Privy Council. That, this 
patriot would be produced before them. That, his position and 
attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he had been the pris- 
oner’s friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour detect- 
ing his infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no 
longer cherish in his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, 
if statues were decreed in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, 
to public benefactors, this shining citizen would assuredly have had 
one. That, as they were not so decreed, he probably would not 
have one. That, Virtue, as had been observed by the poets (in 
many passages which he well knew the jury would have, word for 
word, at the tips of their tongues ; whereat the jury’s countenances 
displayed a guilty consciousness that they knew nothing about 
the passages), was in a manner contagious ; more especially the 
bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country. That, the 
lofty example of this immaculate and unimpeachable witness for 
the Crown, to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, 
had communicated itself to the prisoner’s servant, and had engen- 
dered in him a holy determination to examine his master’s table- 
drawers and pockets, and secrete his papers. That, he (Mr. 
Attorney-General) was prepared to hear some disparagement 
attempted of this admirable servant ; but that, in a general wmy, 
he preferred him to his (Mr. Attorney-General’s) brothers and sis- 
ters, and honoured him more than his (Mr. Attorney-General’s) 
father and mother. That, he called with confidence on the jury 
to come and do likewise. That, the evidence of these two wit- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


55 


nesses, coujDled with the documents of their discovering that would 
be produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with 
lists of his Majesty’s forces, and of their disposition and prepara- 
tion, both by sea and land, and would leave no doubt that he had 
habitually conveyed such information to a hostile power. That, 
these lists could not be proved to be in the prisoner’s handwriting ; 
but that it was all the same ; that, indeed, it was rather the better 
for the prosecution, as showing the prisoner to be artful in his pre- 
cautions. That, the proof would go back five years, and would 
show the prisoner already<|^ngaged in these pernicious missions, 
within a few weeks before the date of the very first action fought 
between the British troops and the Americans. That, for these 
reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they were), and 
being a responsible jury (as they knew they were), must positively 
find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether they 
liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads upon their 
pillows ; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives 
laying their heads upon their pillows ; that, they never could 
endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pil- 
lows ; in short, that there never more could be, for them or theirs, 
any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head 
was taken off. That head Mr. Attorney-General concluded by 
demanding of them, in the name of everything he could think of 
with a round turn in it, and on the faith of his solemn asseveration 
that he already considered the prisoner as good as dead and gone. 

When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as 
if a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in 
anticipation of what he was soon to become. When toned down 
again, the unimpeachable patriot appeared in the vdtness-box. 

Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader’s lead, examined 
the patriot : dohn Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his 
pure soul was exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it 
to be — perhaps, if it had a fault, a little too exactly. Having 
released his noble bosom of its burden, he would have modestly 
withdrawn himself, but that the wigged gentleman with the papers 
before him, sitting not far from Mr. Lorry, begged to ask him a few 
questions. The wigged gentleman sitting opposite, still looking at 
the ceiling of the court. 

Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insin- 
uation. What did he live upon ? His property. Where was his 
property? He didn’t precisely remember where it was. What 
was it ? No business of anybody’s. Had he inherited it? Yes, 
he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very distant? Rather. 
Ever been in prison ? Certainly not. Never in a debtors’ prison? 


56 


A TA].E OF TWO CITIES. 


Didn’t see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors’ prison ? 
— Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two 
or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession ? 
Gentleman. Ever been kicked ? Might have been. Frequently? 
No. Ever kicked down-stairs ? Decidedly not ; once received a 
kick on the top of a staircase, and fell down-stairs of his own 
accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice ? Something 
to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the"^ 
assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true ? Positively. 
Ever live by cheating at play ? . Neven Ever live by play ? Not 
more than other gentlemen do. Ever borrow money of the pris- 
oner? Yes. Ever pay him ? No. Was not this intimacy with 
the prisoner, in reality a very slight one, forced upon the prisoner in 
coaches, inns, and packets? No. Sure he saw the prisoner with 
these lists? Certain. Knew no more about the lists ? 'No. Had 
not procured them, himself, for instance ? No. Expect to get any- 
thing by this evidence ? No. Not in regular government pay and 
employment, to lay traps ? Oh dear no. Or to do anything ? Oh 
dear no. Swear that ? Over and over again. No motives but 
motives of sheer patriotism ? None whatever. 

The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case' 
at a great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good 
faith and simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, 
aboard the Calais packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the 
prisoner had engaged him. He had not asked the prisoner to take 
the handy fellow as an act of charity — never thought of such a 
thing. He began to have suspicions of the prisoner, and to keep 
an eye upon him, soon afterwards. In arranging his clothes, while 
travelling, he had seen similar lists to these in the prisoner’s 
pockets, over and over again. He had taken these lists from the 
drawer of the prisoner’s desk. He had not put them there first. 
He had seen the prisoner show these identical lists to French 
gentlemen at Calais, and similar lists to French gentlemen, both at 
Calais and Boulogne. He loved his country, and couldn’t bear it, 
and had given information. He had never been suspected of steal- 
ing a silver tea-pot ; he had been maligned respecting a mustard- 
pot, but it turned out to be only a plated one. He had known 
the last witness seven or eight years ; that was merely a coinci- 
dence. He didn’t call it a particularly curious coincidence ; most 
coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a curious coinci- 
dence that true patriotism was his only motive too. He was a tme 
Briton, and hoped there were many like him. 

The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called 
Mr. Jarvis Lorry. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


57 


“Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson’s bank?” 

“ I am.” 

“ On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven 
hundred and seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel 
between London and Dover by the mail?” 

“ It did.” - 

“ Were there any other passengers in the mail ? ” 

“ Two.” 

“ Did they alight on the road in the course of the night ? ” 

“ They did.” 

“ Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two 
passengers ? ” 

“ I cannot undertake to say that he was.” 

“Does he resemble either of these two passengers?” 

“ Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we 
were all so reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.” 

“Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him 
wrapped up as those two passengers were, is there anything in his 
bulk and stature to render it unlikely that he was one of them ? ” 
“ No.” 

“You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?” 
“No.” 

“So at least you say he may have been one of them ? ” 

“Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been — like 
myself — timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a 
timorous air.” 

“ Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry ? ” 

“ I certainly have seen that.” 

“ Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen 
him, to your certain knowledge, beforO ? ” 

“ I have.” 

“When?” 

“ I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at 
Calais, the prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I 
returned, and made the voyage with me.” 

“ At what hour did he come on board ? ” 

“At a little after midnight.” 

“ In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who 
came on board at that untimely hour ? ” 

“ He happened to be the only one.” 

“Never mind about ‘happening,’ Mr. Lorry. He was the only 
passenger who came on board in the dead of the night ? ” 

“ He was.” 

“Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?” 


58 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are 
here.” 

“ They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner 

“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long 
and rough, and I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.” 

“ Miss Manette ! ” 

The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned -before, and 
were now turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father 
rose with her, and kept her hand drawn through his arm. 

“Miss Manette, look upon the 'prisoner.” 

To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and 
beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted 
with all the crowd. Standing, as it were, apart with her on the 
edge of his grave, not all the staring curiosity that looked on, could, 
for the moment, nerve him to remain quite still. His hurried 
right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into imaginary beds 
of flowers in a garden ; and his efforts to control and steady his 
breathing shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. 
The buzz of the great flies was loud again. 

“ Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before ^ ” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“ W^here ? ” 

“ On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on 
the same occasion.” 

“You are the young lady just now referred to ? ” 

“ 0 ! most unhappily, I am ! ” ' 

The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musi- 
cal voice of the Judge, as he said something fiercely : “Answer the 
questions put to you, and make no remark upon them.” 

“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on 
that passage across the Channel 1 ” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Recall it.” 

In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began : 

“ When the gentleman came on board ” 

“ Do you mean the prisoner ? ” inquired the Judge,- knitting his 
brows. 

“Yes, my Lord.” 

“ Then say the prisoner.” 

“When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,” 
turning her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside -her, “was much 
fatigued and in a very weak state of health. My father was so 
reduced that I was afraid to take him out of the air, and I had 
made a bed for him on the deck near the cabin steps, and I sat on 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


59 


the deck at his side to take care of him. There were no other pas- 
sengers that night, but we four. The p^risoner was so good as to 
beg permission to advise me how I could shelter my father from 
the wind and weather, better than I had done. I had not known 
how to do it w'ell, not understanding how the wind would set when 
we were out of the harbour. He did it for me. He expressed 
great gentleness and kindness for my father’s state, and I am sure 
he felt it. That was the manner of our beginning to speak 
together.” 

“ Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board 
alone ? ” 

“ No.” 

“How many were with him?” 

“ Two French gentlemen.” 

“ Had they conferred together ? ” 

“ They had conferred together until the last moment, when it 
was necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.” 

“Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to 
these lists ? ” 

“ Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don’t 
know what papers.” 

“ Like these in shape and size ? ” 

“ Possibly, but indeed I don’t know, although they stood whis- 
pering very near to me : because they stood at the top of the cabin 
steps to have the light of the lamp that was hanging there ; it was 
a dull lamp, and they spoke very low, and I did not hear what they 
said, and saw only that they looked at papers.” 

“ Now, to the prisoner’s conversation. Miss Manette.” 

“ The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me — which 
arose out of my helpless situation — as he was kind, and good, and 
useful to my father. I hope,” bursting into tears, “ I may not re- 
pay him by doing him harm to-day.” 

Buzzing from the blue-fiies. 

“ Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that 
you give the evidence which it is your duty to give — which you 
must give — and which you cannot escape from giving — with 
great unwillingness, he is the only person present in that condition. 
Please to go on.” 

“ He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and 
difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he 
w;as therefore travelling under an assumed name. He said that 
this business had, within a few days, taken him to France, and 
might, at intervals, take him backwards and forwards between 
France and England for a long time to come.” ‘ 


60 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“Did he say anything about America, 'Miss Manette? Be 
particular.” 

“ He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he 
said that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one 
on England’s part. He added, in a jesting w^, that perhaps 
George Washington might gain almost as great a name in history 
as George the Third. But there was no harm in his way of saying 
this : it was said laughingly, and to beguile the time.” 

Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief 
actor in a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, 
will be unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead 
was painfully anxious and intent, as she gave this evidence, and, 
in the pauses when she stopped for the Judge to write it down, 
watched its effect upon the counsel for and against. Among the . 
lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the 
court; insomuch, that a great majority of the foreheads there, 
might have been mirrors reflecting the witness, when the Judge 
looked up from his notes to glare at that tremendous heresy about 
George Washington. 

Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed 
it necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the' young 
lady’s father. Doctor Manette. W^ho was called accordingly. 

“ Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen 
him before ? ” 

“Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some 
three years, or three years and a half ago.” 

“ Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the i 
packet, or speak to his conversation with your daughter ? ” 

“ Sir, I can do neither.” | 

“ Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable ; 
to do either ? ” | 

He answered, in a low voice, “ There is.” I 

“ Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, J 
without trial, or even accusation, in your native country. Doctor j 
Manette?” 

He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, “A long 
imprisonment.” 

“ Were you newly released on the occasion in question ? ” 

“ They tell me so.” . 

“ Have you no remembrance of the occasion ? ” ^ 

“None. My mind is a blank, from some time — I cannot even ^ 
say what time — when I employed myself, in m'y captivity, in 
making shoes, to the time when I found myself living in London 
with my dear daughter here. She had become familiar to me, i 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


61 


when a gracious God restored my faculties ; but, I am quite unable 
even to say how she had become familiar. I have no remembrance 
of the process.” 

• Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat 
down together. 

A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in 
hand being to show tliat the prisoner went down, with some fellow- 
plotter untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in Novem- 
ber five years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, 
at a place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled 
back some dozen' miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and 
there collected information ; a witness was called to identify him 
as having been at the precise time required, in the cofiee-room of 
an hotel in that garrison- and-dockyard town, waiting for another 
person. The prisoner’s counsel was cross-examining this witness 
-with no result, except that he had never seen the prisoner on any 
other occasion, when the wigged gentleman who had all this time 
been looking at the ceiling of the court, wrote a word or two on 
a little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Open- 
ing this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with 
great attention and curiosity at the prisoner. 

“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?” 

The witness was quite sure. 

“ Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner ? ” 

Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken. 

“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” 
pointing to him who had^ tossed the paper over, “ and then look 
well upon the prisoner. How say you ? Ai'e they very like each 
other ? ” 

Allowing for my learned friend’s appearance being careless and 
slovenly if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other 
to surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they 
were thus brought into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid 
my learned friend lay aside his wig, and giving no very gracious 
consent, the likeness became much more remarkable. My Lord 
inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner’s counsel), whether they were 
next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned friend) for treason ? 
But, Mr. Stiyver replied to my Lord, no ; but he would ask the 
%itness to tell him whether what happened once, might happen 
twice ; whether he would have been so confident if he had seen 
this illustration of his rashness sooner, whether he would be so con- 
fident, having seen it ; and more. The upshot of which, was, to 
smash this witness like a crockery .’’essel, and shiver his part of 
the. case to useless lumfe. 


62 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off 
his fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend 
while Mr. Stryver fitted tlie prisoner’s case on the jury, like a 
compact suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, 
was a hired spy and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and 
one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas — 
which he certainly did look rather like. How the virtuous servant, 
Cly, was his friend and partner, and was worthy to be ; how the 
watchful eyes of those forgers and false swearers had rested on the 
prisoner as a victim, because some family affairs in France, he being 
of French extraction, did require his making those passages across 
the Channel — though what those affairs were, a consideration for 
others who were near -and dear to him, forbade him, even for his 
life, to disclose. How the evidence that had been warped and 
wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they had 
witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent 
gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any young gentle- 
man and young lady so thrown together ; — with the exception of 
that reference to George Washington, which was altogether too 
extravagant and impossible to be regarded in any other light than 
as a monstrous joke. How it would be a weakness in the govern- 
ment to break clown in this attempt to practise for popularity on 
the lowest national antipathies and fears, and therefore Mr. Attor- 
ney-General had made the most of it ; how, nevertheless, it rested 
upon nothing, save that vile and infamous character of evidence too 
often disfiguring such cases, and of which the State Trials of this 
country were full. But, there my Lord interposed (with as grave 
a face as if it had not been true), saying 1:hat he could not sit upon 
that Bench and suffer those allusions. 

Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had 
next to attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit 
of clothes Mr. Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out ; showing 
how Barsad and Cly were even a hundred times better than he had 
thought them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse. Lastly, 
came my Lord himself, turning the suit of clothes, now inside out, 
now outside in, but on the whole decidedly trimming and shaping 
them into grave-clothes for the prisoner. 

And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed 
again. ^ 

Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the 
court, changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excite- 
ment. While his learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers 
before him, whispered with those who sat near, and from time to 
time glanced anxiously at the jury ; while all the spectators moved 


* 







y/v\'^ 

$ 




64 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


more or less, and grouped themselves anew ; while even my Lord 
himself arose from his seat, and slowly paced up and down his 
platform, not unattended by a suspicion in the minds of the audi- 
ence that his state was feverish ; this one man sat leaning back, 
with his torn gown half off him, his untidy wig put on just as it 
had happened to light on his head after its removal, his hands in 
his pockets, and his eyes on the ceiling as they had been all day. 
Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him 
a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he 
undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnest- 
ness, when they were compared together, had strengthened), 
that many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to 
one another they would hardly have thought the two were so 
alike. Mr. Cruncher made the observation to his next neigh- 
bour, and added, “I’d hold half a guinea that he don’t get no 
law-work to do. Don’t look like the sort of one to get any, 
do he?” 

Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene 
than he appeared to take in ; for now, when Miss Manette’s head 
dropped upon her father’s breast, he was the first to see it, and to 
say audibly : “ Officer ! look to that young lady. Help the gentle- 
man to take her out. Don’t you see she will fall ! ” 

There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and 
much sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great 
distress to him, to have the days of his imprisonment recalled. 
He had shown strong internal agitation when he was questioned, 
and that pondering or brooding look which made him old, had 
been upon him, like a heavy cloud, ever since. As he passed out, 
the jury, who had turned back and paused a moment, spoke, 
through their foreman. 

They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps 
with George Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that 
they were not agreed, but signified his pleasure that they should 
retire under watch and ward, and retired himself. The trial had 
lasted all day, and the lamps in the court were now being lighted. 
It began to be rumoured that the jury would be out a long while. 
The spectators dropped off to get refreshment, and the prisoner 
withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat down. 

Mr. Loriy, who had gone out when the young lady and her 
father went out, now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry : who, 
in the slackened interest, could easily get near him. 

“Jerry, if you wish to take something^ to eat, you can. But, 
keep in the way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come 
in. Don’t be a moment behind them, for I want you to take the 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


65 


verdict back to the bank. You are the quickest messenger I 
know, and will get to Temple Bar long before I can.” 

Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it 
in acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. 
Carton came up at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the 
arm. 

“ How is the young lady ? ” ^ 

“ She is greatly distressed ; but her father is comforting her, 
and she feels the better for being out of court.” 

“ I’ll tell the prisoner so. It won’t do for a respectable bank 
gentleman like you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.” 

Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated 
the point in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the out- 
side of the bar. The way out of court lay in that direction, and 
Jerry followed him, all eyes, ears, and spikes. 

“ Mr. Darnay ! ” 

The prisoner came forward directly. 

“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness. Miss 
Manette. She will do very well. You have seen the worst of her 
agitation.” 

“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you 
tell her so for me, with my fervent acknowledgments ? ” 

“Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.” 

Mr. Carton’s manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. 
He stood, half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow 
against the bar. 

“ I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.” > 

“What,” said Carton, still only half turned towards him, “do 
you expect, Mr. Damay ? ” 

“ The worst.” 

“ It’s the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think 
their withdrawing is in your favour.” 

Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry 
heard no more : but left them — so like each other in feature, so 
unlike each other in manner — standing side by side, both reflected 
in the glass above them. 

An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal 
crowded passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies 
and ale. The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form 
after taking that refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud 
murmur and a rapid tide of people setting up the stairs that led 
to the court, carried him along with them. 

“ Jerry ! Jerry ! ” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door 
when he got there. 


F 


66 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Here, sir ! It’s a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir ! ” 

Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “ Quick ! 
Have you got it ? ” 

“Yes, sir.” 

Hastily written on the paper was the word “Acquitted.” 

“If you had sent the message, ‘Eecalled to Life,’ again,” mut- 
tered Jerry, as he turned, “ I should have known what you meant, 
this time.” 

He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, any- 
thing else, until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd 
came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his 
legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue- 
flies were dispersing in search of other carrion. 


CHAPTER IV. 

CONGKATULATOKY. 

From the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment 
of the human stew that had been boiling there all day, was strain- 
ing off, when Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. 
Lorry, the solicitor for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, 
stood gathered round Mr. Charles Darnay — just released — con- 
gratulating him on his escape from death. 

It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise 
in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the 
shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked 
at him twice, without looking again : even though the opportunity 
of observation had not extended to the mournful cadence of his 
low gra^e voice, and to the abstraction that overclouded him fit- 
fully, without any apparent reason. While one external cause, 
and that a reference to his long lingering agony, would always — 
as on the trial — evoke this condition from the depths of his soul, 
it was also in its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over 
him, as incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story 
as if they had seen the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon 
him by a summer sun, when the substance was three hundred 
miles away. 

Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brood- 
ing from his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to 
a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery : and 
the sound of her voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand, 
had a strong beneficial influence with him almost always. Not 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


67 


absolutely always, for she could recall some occasions on which her 
power had failed; but they were few and slight, and she believed 
them over. 

Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and 
had turned to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stry ver, 
a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older 
than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of 
delicacy, liad a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and 
physically) into companies and conversations, that argued well for 
his shouldering his way up in life. 

He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself 
at his late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. 
Lorry clean out of the group : “I am glad to have brought you off 
with honour, Mr. Darnay. It was an infamous prosecution, grossly 
infamous ; but not the less likely to succeed on that account.” 

“You have laid me under an obligation to you for life — in two 
senses,” said his late client, taking his hand. 

“ I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay ; and my best is as 
good as another man’s, I believe.” 

It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, “Much better,” 
Mr. Lorry said it ; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the 
interested object of squeezing himself back again. 

“You think so?” said Mr. Stryver. “Well! you have been 
present all day, and you ought to know. You are a man of busi- 
ness, too.” 

“And as such,” quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in 
the law had now shouldered back into the group, just as he had 
previously shouldered him out of it — “ as such I will appeal to 
Doctor Manette, to break up this conference and order us all to our 
homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr. Darnay has had a terrible day, 
we are worn out.” 

“ Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver ; “I have a night’s 
work to do yet. Speak for yourself.” 

I “ I speak for myself,” answered Mr. Lorry, “ and for Mr. Darnay, 

i and for Miss Lucie, and Miss Lucie, do you not think I may 

speak for us all ? ” He asked her the question pointedly, and with 
a glance at her father. 

His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at 
i Darnay ; an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and dis- 
i trust, not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression 
t on him his thoughts had wandered away. 

“ My father,” said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his. 

\ He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her. 

! “ Shall we go home, my father ? ” 


68 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


With a long breath, he answered “ Yes.” 

The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the 
impression — which he himself had originated — that he would not 
be released that night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in 
the passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a 
rattle, and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning’s 
interest of gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-iron, should 
repeople it. Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie 
Manette passed into the open air. A hackney-coach was called, 
and the father and daughter departed in it. 

Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way 
back to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the 
group, or interchanged a word with any oile of them, but who had 
been leaning against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had 
silently strolled out after the rest, and had looked on until the 
coach drove away. He now stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and 
Mr. Darnay stood upon the pavement. 

“ So, Mr. Lorry ! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay 
now ? ” 

Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton’s part in 
the day’s proceedings ; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, 
and was none the better for it in appearance. 

“ If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, 
when the business mind is divided between good-natured impulse 
and business appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.” 

Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, “You have mentioned that 
before, sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own 
masters. We have to think of the House more than ourselves.” 

“ 1 know, I know,” rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly: “ Don’t be 
nettled, Mr. Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt ; 
better, I dare say.” 

“ And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “ I 
really don’t know what you have to do with the matter. If you’ll 
excuse me, as very much your elder, for saying so, I really don’t 
know that it is your business.” 

“ Business ! Bless you, I have no business,” said Mr. Carton. 

“ It is a pity you have not, sir.” 

“ I think so, too.” 

“ If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “ perhaps you would attend 
to it.” 

“Lord love you, no ! — I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Carton. 

“ Well, sir ! ” cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indiffer- 
ence, “ business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. 
And, sir, if business imposes its restraints and its silences and im- 


/ 


\ 







CONGRATULATIONS, 







70 


A TALE OF two CITIES. 


pediments, Mr. Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows 
how to make allowance for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good 
night, God bless you, sir ! I hope you have been this day preserved 
for a prosperous and happy life. — Chair there ! ” 

Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as wdth the barrister, 
Mr. Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson’s. 
Carton, who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite 
sober, laughed then, and turned to Darnay : 

“ This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. 
This must be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your 
counterpart on these street stones?” 

“ I hardly seem yet,” returned Charles Darnay, “ to belong to 
this world again.” 

“ I don’t wonder at it ; it’s not so long since you were pretty far 
advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly.” 

“ I begin to think I am faint.” 

“ Then why the devil don’t you dine ? I dined, myself, while 
those numskulls were- deliberating which world you should belong 
to — this, or some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to 
dine well at.” 

Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate- 
hill to Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, 
they were shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was 
soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good 
wine : while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his 
separate bottle of port before him, and his fully half-insolent man- 
ner upon him. 

“Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme 
again, Mr. Darnay?” 

“ I am frightfully confused regarding time and place ; but I am 
so far mended as to feel that.” 

“ It must be an immense satisfaction ! ” 

He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again : which was a 
large one. 

“As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong 
to it. It has no good in it for me — except wine like this — nor I 
for it. So we are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin 
to think we are not much alike in any particular, you and I.” 

Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there 
with this Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dreanj, Charles 
Darnay was at a loss how to answer ; finally, answered not at all. 

“How your dinner. is done,” Carton presently said, “why don’t 
you call a health, Mr. Darnay ; why don’t you give your toast ? ” 

“ What health ? What toast ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


71 


“Why, it’s on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it 
must be. I’ll swear it’s there.” 

“ Miss Manette, then ! ” 

“ Miss Manette, then ! ” 

Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast. 
Carton flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it 
shivered to pieces ; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another. 

“ That’s a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. 
Darnay ! ” he said, filling his new goblet. 

A slight frown and a laconic “Yes,” were the answer. 

“ That’s a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by ! 
How does it feel ? Is it worth being tried for one’s life, to be the. 
object of such sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay ? ” 

Again Darnay answered not a word. 

“ She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave 
it her. Not that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she 
was.” 

The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this 
disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in 
the strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and 
thanked him for it, ’ 

“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,” was the careless 
rejoinder. “ It was nothing to do, in the first place ; and I don’t 
^ know why I did it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a 
question.” 

P “ Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.” 

“ Do you think I particularly like you ? ” 

“ Really, Mr. Carton,” returned the other, oddly disconcerted, 
“I have not asked myself the question.” 

“ But ask yourself the question now.” 

“You have acted as if you do ; but I don’t think you do.” 

“ / don’t think I do,” said Carton. “ I begin to have a very 
good opinion of your understanding.” 

“Nevertheless,” pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, “there 
is nothing in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning,' 
and our parting without ill-blood on either side.” 

Carton rejoining, “Nothing in life!” Darnay rang. “ Do you 
cali the whole reckoning?” said Carton. On his answering in;Kne 
affirmative, “Then bring me another pint of this sam^Wine, 
drawer, and come and wake me at ten.” 

The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good 
night Witliout returning the wish. Carton rose too, with some- 
thing of a threat of defiance in his manner, and said, “A last 
word, Mr. Darnay : you think I am drunk ? ” 


72 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton.” 

“ Think ? You know I have been drinking.” 

“ Since I must say so, I know it.” 

“Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed 
drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth 
cares for me.” 

“Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents 
better.” 

“ May be so, Mr. Darnay ; may be not. Don’t let your sober 
face elate you, however; you don’t know what it may come to. 
Good night ! ” 

When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, 
went to a glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himsdf 
minutely in it. 

“ Do you particularly like the man ? ” he muttered, at his own 
image; “why should you particularly like a man who resembles 
you ? There is nothing in you to like ; you know that. Ah, con- 
found you ! What a change you have made in yourself ! A good 
reason for taking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen 
away from, and what you -might have been ! Change places with 
him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he 
was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was ? Come 
on, and have it out in plain words ! You hate the fellow.” 

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a 
few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling 
over the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping 
down upon him. 


CHAPTER V. 

THE JACKAL. 

Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very 
great is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, 
that a moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch 
which one man would swallow in the course of a night, without 
any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would 
seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned pro- 
fession of the law was certainly not behind any other learned pro- 
fession in its Bacchanalian propensities ; neither was Mr. Stryver, 
already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, 
behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier 
parts of the legal race. 

A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


73 


Stryver had begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the 
ladder on which he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now 
to summon their favourite, specially, to their longing arms ; and 
shouldering itself towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in 
the Court of King’s Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver 
'might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great 
sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full 
of flaring companions. 

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was 
a glib man, and an unscmpulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had 
not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of state- 
ments, which is among the most striking and necessary of the ad- 
vocate’s accomplishments. But, a remarkable improvement came 
upon him as to this. The more business he got, the greater his 
power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow ; and 
however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he 
always had his points at his Angers’ ends in the morning. 

Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stry- 
ver’s great ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary 
Term and Michaelmas, might have floated a king’s ship. Stryver 
never had a case in hand, anywhere, but Carton was there, with 
his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling of the court ; they 
went the same Circuit, and even there they prolonged their usual 
orgies late into the night, and Carton was rumoured to be seen at 
broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like 
a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about, among such as 
were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton would 
never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he ren- 
dered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity. 

“ Ten o’clock, sir,” said the man at the tavern, whom he had 
charged to wake him — “ ten o’clock, sir.” 

“ Wliafs the matter?” 

“ Ten o’clock, sir.” 

! “ What do you mean ? Ten o’clock at night ? ” 

“Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.” 

“ Oh ! I remember. Very well, very well.” 

After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man 
dexterously combated by stirring the Are continuously for five 
minutes, he got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned 
into the Temple, and, having revived himself by twice pacing the 
pavements of King’s Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into 
I the Stryver chambers. 

The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had 
gone liome, and the Stiyver principal opened tlie door. He had his 


74 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


slippers on, and a loose bed-gown, and liis throat was bare for his 
greater ease. He had that rather wild, strained, seared marking 
about the eyes, which may be observed in all free livers of his 
class, from the portrait of Jeffries downward, and which can be 
traced, under various disguises of Art, through the portraits of 
every Drinking Age. 

“ You are a little late. Memory,” said Stryver. 

“About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.” 

They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with 
papers, where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon 
the hob, and in the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, 
with plenty of wine upon it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and 
lemons. 

“You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.” 

“ Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day’s 
client ; or seeing him dine — it’s all one ! ” 

“ That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon 
the identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike 
you V’ • . 

“ I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I 
should have been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any 
luck.” 

Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch. 

“You and your luck, Sydney ! Get to work, get to work.” 

Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an 
adjoining room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a 
basin, and a towel or two. Steeping the towels in the’water, and 
partially wringing them out, he folded them on his head in a man- 
ner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and said, “Now I 
am ready ! ” 

“Not much boiling down to be done to-night. Memory,” said 
Mr. Stryver, gaily, as he looked among his papers. 

“How much?” 

“ Only two sets of them.” 

“Give me the worst first.” 

“ There they are, Sydney. Fire away ! ” 

The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side 
of the drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn 
table proper, on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses 
ready to his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table without 
stint, but each in a different way ; the lion for the most part reclin- 
ing with his hands in his waistband, looking at the fire, or occasion- 
ally flirting with some lighter document ; the jackal, with knitted 
brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that liis eyes did not 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


75 


even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass — which often 
• groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for 
his lips. Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, 
that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his 
towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he re- 
turned with such eccentricities of damp head-gear as no words can 
describe ; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious 
gravity. 

At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the 
lion, and proceeded to offer it- to him. The lion took it with care 
and caution, made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, 
and the jackal assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, 
the lion put his hands in his waistband again, and lay down to 
meditate. The jackal then invigorated himself with a bumper for 
his throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied him- 
self to the collection of a second meal; this was administered to 
the lion in the same manner, and was not disposed of until the 
clocks struck three in the morning. 

“ And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said 
'Mr. Stryver. 

The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had 
been steaming again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and com- 
plied. , » 

“You -were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown 
witnesses to-day. Every question told.” 

“ I always am sound ; am I not ? ” 

“I don’t gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put 
some punch to it and smooth it again.” 

With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied. 

“ The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver, 
nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and 
the past, “ the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the 
next ; now in spirits and now in despondency ! ” 

“ Ah ! ” returned the ‘other, sighing : “ yes ! The same Sydney, 
with the,, same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, 
and seldom did my own.” 

“ And why not ? ” 

“ God knows. It was my way, I suppose.” 

He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out 
before him, looking at the fire. 

“ Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bully- 
ing air, as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained 
endeavour was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the 
old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him 


70 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


into it, “your way is, and always was, a lame way. You summon 
no energy and purpose. Look at me.” 

“ Oh, botheration ! ” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more 
good-humoured laugh, “ don’t you be moral ! ” 

“ How have I done what I have done % ” said Stiyver ; “ how do 
I do what I do r’ 

“Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it’s 
not worth your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it ; 
what you want to do, you do. You were always in the front rank, 
and I was always behind.” 

“ I had to get into the front rank ; I was not born there, 
was I ? ” 

“ I was not present at the ceremony ; but my opinion is you 
were,” said Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both 
laughed. 

“ Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrews- 
bury,” pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I- 
have fallen into mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the 
Student-Quarter of Paris, picking up French, and French law, and 
other French crumbs that we didn’t get much good of, you were 
always somewhere, and I was always — nowhere.” 

“And whose fault was that?” 

“Upon my soul, I am not ^ sure that it was not ypurs. You 
were always driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that 
restless degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and re- 
pose. It’s a gloomy thing, however, to talk about one’s own past, 
with the day breaking. Turn me in some other direction before 
I go.” 

“ Well then ! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, 
holding up his glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction ?” 

Apparently not, for he became gloomy again. 

“ Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. 
“ I have had enough of witnesses to-day and to-night ; wdio’s your 
pretty witness ? ” 

“ The picturesque doctor’s daughter, Miss Manette.” 

“ She pretty % ” 

^ “ Is she not ? ” 

“ No.” 

“Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court 1 ” 

“ Rot the admiration of the whole Court ! Who made the Old 
Bailey a judge of beauty ? She was a golden-haired doll ! ” 

“ Do you know, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with 
sharp eyes, and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face : “do 
you know, I rather thought, at the time, that you sympathised 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


77 


with the golden-haired doll, and were quick to see what happened 
to the golden-haired doll ? ” 

“ Quick to see what happened ! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons 
within a yard or two of a man’s nose, he can see it without a per- 
spective-glass. I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now 
I’ll have no more drink ; I’ll get to bed.” 

When his host followed him out on the staircase -with a candle, 
to light him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through 
its grimy windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold 
and sad, the dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole 
scene like a lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning 
round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand 
had risen far away, and the first spray of it in its advance had 
begun to overwhelm the city. 

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood 
still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying 
in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self- 
denial,, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were 
airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, 
gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope 
that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climb- 
ing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down 
in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with 
wasted tears. 

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose ; it rose upon no sadder sight than 
the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their 
directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, 
sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat 
him away. * 


CHAPTER VI. 

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE. 

The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street- 
corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain 
fine Sunday when the waves of four months had rolled over the 
trial for treason, and carried it, as to the public interest and 
memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis Lorry walked along the sunny 
streets from Clerkenwell where he lived, on his way to dine with 
the Doctor. After several relapses into business-absorption, Mr. 
Lorry had become the Doctor’s friend, and the quiet street-corner 
was the sunny part of his life. 

On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, 


78 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


early in the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, 
on fine Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor 
and Lucie; secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was 
accustomed to be with them as the family friend, talking, reading, 
looking out of window, and generally getting through the day; 
thirdly, because he happened to have his own little shrewd doubts 
to solve, and knew how the ways of the Doctor’s household pointed 
to that time as a likely time for solving them. 

A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was 
not to be found in London. There was no way through it, and the 
front windows of the Doctor’s lodgings commanded a pleasant little 
vista of street that had a congenial air of retirement on it. There 
were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees 
flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in 
the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated 
in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into the 
parish like stray paupers without a settlement ; and there was 
many a good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripenM 
in their season. 

The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier 
part of the day ; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was 
in shadow, though not in shadow so remote but that you could see 
beyond it into a glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid 
but cheerful, a wonderful place for echoes, and a very harbour from 
the raging streets. 

There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, 
and there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large still 
house, where several callings purported to be pursued by day, but 
whereof little was audible any day, and which was shunned by all 
of them at night. In a building at, the back, attainable by a court- 
yard where a plane-tree rustled its green leaves, church-organs 
claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise gold to 
be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting 
out of the wall of the front hall — as if he had beaten himself 
precious, and menaced a similar conversion of all visitors. Very 
little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured to live up- 
stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have a count- 
ing-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a stray 
workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger 
peered about there, or a distant clink was heard across the court- 
yard, or a thump from the golden giant. These, however, were 
only the exceptions required to prove the rule that the sparrows in 
the plane-tree behind the house, and the echoes in the corner before 
it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto Saturday night. 


A TALE UE TWO CITIES. 


79 


Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, 
and its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him. 
His scientiflc knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting 
ingenious experhnents, brought him otherwise into moderate re- 
quest, and he earned as much as he wanted. 

These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry’s knowledge, thoughts, 

, and notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the 
corner, on the fine Sunday afternoon. 

“ Doctor Manette at home 1 ” 

Expected home. 

“ Miss Lucie at home ? ” 

Expected home. 

“ Miss Press at home ? ” 

Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for hand-maid to 
anticipate intentions of Miss Press, as to admission or denial of 
the fact. 

“As I am at home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “ I’ll go up-stairs.” 

' Although the Doctor’s daughter had known nothing of the couiir 
try of her birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that 
ability to make much of little means, which is one of its most use- 
ful and most agreeable characteristics. Simple as the furniture 
was, it was set off by so many little adornments, of no value but 
for their taste and fancy, that its effect was delightful. The dis- 
position of everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the 
least ; the arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and contrast 
obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good 
sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive 'of 
their originator, that, as Mr. Lorry stood looking about him, the very 
chairs and tables seemed to ask him, with something of that peculiar 
expression which he knew so well by this time, whether he approved ? 

There were three rooms on a. floor, and, the doors by which they 
communicated being put open that the air might pass freely 
through them all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful 
resemblance which he detected all around him, walked from one to 
another. The first was the best room, and in it were Lucie’s birds, 
and flowers, and books, and desk, and work-table, and box of water- 
colours ; the second was the Doctor’s consulting-room, used also as 
the dining-room; the third, changingly speckled by the rustle of 
the plane-tree in the yard, was the Doctor’s bed-room, and there, in 
a corner, stood the disused shoemaker’s bench and tray of tools, 
much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the dismal house by the 
wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris. 

“I wonder,” said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, “that 
he keeps that reminder of his sufferings about him ! ” 


80 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“And why wonder at thatT’ was the abrupt inquiry that made 
him start. 

It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of 
hand, whose acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George 
Hotel at Dover, and had since improved. 

“ I should have thought ” Mr. Lorry began. 

“ Pooh ! You’d have thought ! ” said Miss Pross ; and Mr. Lorry 
left off. 

“How do you do?” inquired that lady then — sharply, and yet 
as if to express that she bore him no malice. 

“I am pretty well, I thank you,” answered Mr. Lorry, with 
meekness ; “ how are you ? ” 

“Nothing to boast of,” said Miss Pross. 

“ Indeed ? ” 

“Ah! indeed!” said Miss Pross. “I am very much put out 
about my Ladybird.” 

“ Indeed ? ” 

“For gracious sake say something else besides ‘indeed,’ or you’ll 
fidget me to death,” said Miss Pross : whose character (dissociated 
from stature) was shortness. 

“ Really, then ? ” said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment. 

“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better. 
Yes, I am very much put out.” 

“ May I ask the cause ? ” 

“ I don’t want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of 
Ladybird, to come here looking after her,” said Miss Pross. 

“ Do dozens come for that purpose ? ” 

“ Hundreds,” said Miss Pross.. 

It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before 
her time and since) that whenever her original proposition was 
questioned, she exaggerated it. 

“Dear me!” said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could 
think of. 

“ I have lived with the darling — or the darling has lived with 
me, and paid me for it; which she certainly should never have 
done, you may take your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep 
either myself or her for nothing — since she was ten years old. And 
it’s really very hard,” said Miss Pross. 

Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook 
his head ; using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy 
cloak that would fit anything. 

“ All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of 
the pet, are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you 
began it ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ I began it, Miss Pross ? ” 

“ Didn’t you ? Who brought her father to life ? ” 

“ Oh ! If that was beginning it ” said Mr. Lorry. 

“ It wasn’t ending it, I suppose ? I say, when you began it, it 
was hard enough ; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor 
Manette, except that he is not worthy of such a daughter, which is 
no imputation on him, for it was not to be expected that anybody 
should be, under any circumstances. But it really is doubly and 
trebly hard to have crowds and multitudes of people turning up 
after him (I could have forgiven him), to take Ladybird’s affections 
away from me.” 

Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew 
her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one 
of those unselfish creatures — found only among women — who 
will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, 
to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to 
accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to 
bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives. He 
knew' enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it 
better than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so 
free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted respect for 
it, that in the retributive arrangements made by his own mind — 
we all make such arrangements, more or less — he stationed Miss 
Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasu- 
rably better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at 
Tellson’s. 

“ There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Lady- 
bird,” said Miss Pross ; “and that was my brother Solomon, if he 
hadn’t made a mistake in life.” 

Here again : Mr. Lorry’s inquiries into Miss Pross’s personal his- 
tory had established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heart- 
less scoundrel who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a 
stake to speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for 
evermore, with no touch of compunction. Miss Pross’s fidelity of 
belief in Solomon (deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) 
was quite a serious matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in 
his good opinion of her. 

“ As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people 
of business,” he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room 
and had sat down there in friendly relations, “ let me ask you — 
does the Doctor, in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemak- 
ing time, yet ? ” 

“ Never.” 

“ And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him ? ” 


82 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


‘‘ Ah ! ” returned Miss Press, shaking her head. “ But I don’t 
say he don’t refer to it within himself.” 

“ Do you believe that he thinks of it much ? ’' 

“ I do,” said Miss Press. 

“Do you imagine ” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Press 

took him up short with : 

“Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.” 

“ I stand corrected ; do you suppose — you go so far as to sup- 
pose, sometimes r’ 

“Now and then,” said Miss Press. 

“Do you suppose,” Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle 
in his bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, “that Doctor Manette 
has any theory of his own, preserved through all those years, rela- 
tive to the cause of his being so oppressed ; perhaps, even to the 
name of his oppressor ? ” 

“I don’t suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells 
me.” 

“ And that is ? ” 

“ That she thinks he has.” 

“Now don’t be angry at my asking all these questions ; because 
I am a mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of 
business.” 

“ Dull ? ” Miss Pross inquired, with placidity. 

Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, 
“No, no, no. Surely not. To return to business ; — Is it not 
remarkable that Doctor Manette, unquestionably innocent of any 
crime as we are all well assured he is, should never touch upon 
that question ? I will not say with me, though he had business 
relations with me many years ago, and we are now intimate ; I 
will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly attached, 
and who is so devotedly attached to him h Believe me. Miss Pross, 
I don’t approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of 
zealous interest.” 

“Well ! To the best of my understanding, and bad’s the best, 
you’ll tell me,” said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, 
“ he is afraid of the whole subject.” 

“Afraid?” 

“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a 
dreadful remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out 
of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered 
himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. 
That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should think.” 

It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. 
“True,” said he, “and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt" lurks 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


83 


iu my mind, Miss Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette 
to have that suppression always shut up within him. Indeed, it 
is this doubt and the uneasiness it sometimes causes me that has 
led me to our present confidence.” 

“ Can’t be helped,” said Miss Pross, shaking her head. “Touch 
that string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave 
it alone. In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, 
he gets up in the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us over- 
head there, walking up and down, walking up and down, in his 
room. Ladybird has learnt to know then that his mind is walking 
up and down, walking up and down, in his old prison. She hurries 
to him, and they go on together, walking up and down, walking up 
and down, until he is composed. But he never says a word of the 
true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to 
hint at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down together, 
walking up and down together, till her love and company have 
brought him to himself.” 

Notwithstanding Miss Pross’s denial of her own imagination, 
there was a perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted 
by one sad idea, in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and 
down, which testified to her possessing such a thing. 

The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes ; 
it had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, 
that it seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to 
and fro had set it going. 

“ Here they are ! ” said Miss Pross, rising to break up the con- 
ference ; “ and now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon ! ” 

It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such 
a peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open 
window, looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, 
he fancied they would never approach. Not only would the echoes 
die away, as though the steps had gone ; but, echoes of other steps 
that never came would be heard in their stead, and would die away^ 
for good when they seemed close at hand. However, father and 
daughter did at last appear, and Miss Pross was ready at the street 
door to receive them. 

Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, 
taking off her darling’s bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touch- 
ing it up with the ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust 
off it, and folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing 
her rich hair with as much pride as she could possibly have taken 
in her own hair if she had been the vainest and handsomest of 
women. Her darling was a pleasant sight too, embracing her and 
thanking her, and protesting against her taking so much trouble 


84 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


for her — which last she only dared to do playfully, or Miss Pross, 
sorely hurt, would have retired to her own chamber and cried. The 
Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on at them, and telling Miss 
Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with eyes that had as 
much spoiling in them as Miss Pross had, and would have had more 
if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a pleasant sight too, beaming at 
all this in his little wig, and thanking his bachelor stars for having 
lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But, no Hundreds 
of people came to see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain for 
the fulfilment of Miss Pross’s prediction. 

Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In 'the arrange- 
ments of the little household. Miss Pross took charge of the lower 
regions, and always acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, 
of a very modest quality, were so well cooked and so well served, 
and so neat in their contrivances, half English and half French, 
that nothing could be better. Miss Pross’s friendship being of the 
thoroughly practical kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent 
provinces, in search of impoverished! Frdnch, who, tempted by 
shillings and half-crowns, would impart' culinary mysteries to her. 
From these decayed sons and daughters of Gaul, she had acquired 
such wonderful arts, that the woman and girl who formed the staff 
of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress, or Cinderella’s God- 
mother ; who would send out for a fowl, a rabbit, a vegetable or 
two from the garden, and change them into anything she pleased. 

On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor’s table, but on 
other days persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either 
in the lower regions, or in her own room on the second floor — a 
blue chamber, to which no one but her Ladybird ever gained 
admittance. On this occasion. Miss Pross, responding to Lady- 
bird’s pleasant face and pleasant efforts to please her, unbent ex- 
ceedingly ; so the dinner was very pleasant, too. 

It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that 
the wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they 
should sit there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and 
revolved about her, they went out under the plane-tree, and she 
carried the wine down for the special benefit of Mr. Lorry. She 
had installed herself, some time before, as Mr. Lorry’s cup-bearer ; 
and while they sat under the plane-tree, talking, she kept his 
glass replenished. Mysterious backs and ends of houses peeped 
at them as they talked, and the plane-tree whispered to them in 
its own way above their heads. 

Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. 
Darnay presented himself while they were sitting under the plane- 
tree, but he was only One. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


85 


Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, 
Miss Pross suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head 
and body, and retired into the house. She was not unfrequently 
the victim of this disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversa- 
tion, “a fit of the jerks.” 

The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially 
young. The resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong 
at such times, and as they sat side by side, she leaning on his 
shoulder, and he resting his arm on the back of her chair, it was 
very agreeable to trace the likeness. 

He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with un- 
usual vivacity. “ Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they 
sat under the plane-tree — and he said it in the natural pursuit of 
the topic in hand, which happened to be the old buildings of Lon- 
don — “ have you seen much of the Tower ? ” 

“ Lucie and I have been there ; but only casually. We have seen 
enough of it, to know that it teems with interest ; little more.” 

“/ have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a 
smile, though reddening a little angrily, “in another character, 
and not in a character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. 
They told me a curious thing when I was there.” 

“What w^as that? ” Lucie asked. 

“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old 
dungeon, which had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. 
Every stone of its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which 
had been carved by prisoners — dates, names, complaints, and 
prayers. Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall, one pris- 
oner, who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his last 
work, three letters. They w^ere done with some very poor instru- 
ment, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first, they were 
read as D. I. C. ; but, on being more carefully examined, the last 
letter was found to be G. There was no record or legend of any 
prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses were made 
what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested that 
the letters were not initials, but the complete word. Dig. The 
floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in 
the earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, 
were found the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a 
small leathern case or bag. What the unknown prisoner had writ- 
ten will never be read, but he had written something, and hidden 
it away to keep it from the gaoler.” 

“ My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill ! ” 

He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His 
manner and his look quite terrified them all. 


86 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, 
and they made me start. We had better go in.” 

He recovered himself almost instantly. Kain was really falling 
in large drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain- drops 
on it. But, he said not a single word in reference to the discovery 
that had been told of, and, as they went into the house, the busi- 
ness eye of Mr. Lorry either detected, or fancied it detected, on 
his face, as it turned towards Charles Darnay, the same singular 
look that had been upon it when it turned towards him in the 
passages of the Court House. 

He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had 
doubts of his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the 
hall was not more steady than he was, when he stopped under it 
to remark to them that he was not yet proof against slight sur- 
prises (if he ever would be), and that the rain had startled him. 

Tea-time, and Miss Press making tea, with another fit of the 
jerks upon her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had 
lounged in, but he made only Two. 

The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors 
and windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the 
tea-table was done with, they all moved to one of the windows, 
and looked out into the heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father ; 
Darnay sat beside her; Carton leaned against a window. The 
curtains were long and white, and some of the thunder-gusts that 
whirled into the corner, caught them up to the ceiling, and waved 
them like spectral wings. 

“ The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said 
Doctor Manette. “ It comes slowly.” 

“It comes surely,” said Carton. 

They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do ; 
as people in a dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, 
always do. 

There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away 
to get shelter before the storm broke ; the wonderful corner for 
echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, 
yet not a footstep was there. 

“ A multitude of people, and yet a solitude ! ” said Darnay, when 
they had listened for a while. 

“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Some- 
times, I have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied but 

even the shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when 
all is so black and solemn ” 

“ Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.” 

“ It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


87 


as we originate them, I think ; they are not to be communicated. 
I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I 
have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that 
are coming by-and-bye into our lives.” 

“ There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that 
be so,” Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way. 

The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became 
more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the 
tread of feet ; some, as it seemed, under the windows ; some, as it 
seemed, in the room ; some coming, some going, some breaking olf, 
some stopping altogether ; all in the distant streets, and not one 
within sight. 

“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss 
Manette, or are we to divide them among us ? ” 

“ I don’t know, Mr. Darnay ; I told you it was a foolish fancy, 
but you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have 
been alone, and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the 
people who are to come into my life, and my father’s.” 

“I take them into mine! ’’said Carton, “/ask no questions 
and make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down 

upon us. Miss Manette, and I see them by the Lightning.” 

He added the last words, after there had been a vivid flash which 
had shown him lounging in the window. 

“ And I hear them ! ” he added again, after a peal of thunder. 
“ Here they come, fast, fierce, and furious I ” 

It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified; and it stopped 
him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of 
thunder and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there 
was not a moment’s interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after 
the moon rose at midnight. 

The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking One in the cleared 
air, when Mr. Lorry, escorted by J erry, high-booted and bearing a 
lantern, set forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were 
solitary patches of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, 
and Mr. Lorry, mindful of footpads, always retained J erry for this 
service : though it was usually performed a good two hours earlier. 

“What a night it has been 1 Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr. 
Lorry, “to bring the dead out of their graves.” 

“ I never see the night myself, master — nor yet I don’t expect 
to — what would do that,” answered Jerry. 

“ Good, night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “ Good 
night, Mr. Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together 1 ” 

Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush 
and roar, bearing down upon them, too. 


88 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER VII. 

MONSEIGNEUR IN TOWN. 

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, 
held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Mon- 
seigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, tlie 
Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of 
rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. 
Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was 
by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing 
France ; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into 
the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men 
besides the Cook. 

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decora- 
tion, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two 
gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste 
fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to 
Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the 
sacred presence ; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with 
the little instrument he bore for that function ; a third, presented 
the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), 
poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to 
dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold 
his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have 
been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been igno- 
bly waited on by only three men ; he must have died of two. 

Monseigjmur had been out at a little supper last night, where 
the Comedy' and the Grand Opera were charmingly repr^i^nted. 
Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights, witli fascinating 
company. So polite and so impressible was Monseigneur, that the 
Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more influence with him in 
the tiresome articles of state affairs and state secrets, than the needs 
of all France: A happy circumstance for France, as the like always 
is for all countries similarly favoured ! — always was for England 
(by way of example), in the regretted days of the merry Stuart who 
sold it. 

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, 
which was, to let everything go on in its own way ; of particular 
public business. Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it 
must all go his way — tend to his own power and pocket. Of his 
pleasures, general and particular. Monseigneur had the other truly 
noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his 
order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is not 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


89 


much) ran : “ The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith 
Monseigneur.” 

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments 
crept into his affairs, both private and public ; and he had, as to 
both classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-Gen- 
eral. As to finances public, because Monseigneur could not make 
anything at all of them, and must consequently let them out to 
somebody who could ; as to finances private, because Farmer-Gen- 
erals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury 
and expense, was growing poor. Hence Monseigneur had taken his 
sister from a convent, while there was yet time to ward off the 
impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and had 
bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in 
family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with 
a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in 
the outer rooms, much prostrated before by mankind — always 
excepting superior mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his 
own wife included, looked down upon him with the loftiest con- 
tempt. 

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood 
in his stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body- 
women waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing 
but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General — 
howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality — 
was at least tlie greatest reality among the personages who attended 
at the hotel of Monseigneur that day. 

For, the rooms, thougli a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned 
with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time 
could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered 
with att^ reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps else- 
where (and not so far off, either, but that the watching towers of 
Notre Dame, almost equi-distant from the two extremes, could see 
them both), they would have been an exceedingly uncomfortable 
business — if that could have been anybody’s business, at the house 
of Monseigneur. Military officers destitute of military knowledge ; 
naval officers with no idea of a ship ; civil officers without a notion 
of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of, the worst world worldly, with 
sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ; all totally unfit for 
their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to 
them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and 
therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything 
was to be got ; these were to be told off by the score and the score. 
People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, 
yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives 


90 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, 
were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of 
dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled 
upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. 
Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little 
evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of set- 
ting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their dis- 
tracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception 
of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling 
the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale 
the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye 
on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumu- 
lated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, 
which was at that remarkable time — and has been since — to be 
known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject of 
human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, 
at the hojtel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various nota- 
bilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies 
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur — forming a goodly 
half of the polite company — would have found it hard to discover 
among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her man- 
ners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for 
the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world — 
which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother 
— there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women 
kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and 
charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty. 

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in 
attendance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half 
a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some 
vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather 
wrong. As a promising way of setting them right, half of the 
half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsion- 
ists, and were even then considering within themselves whether 
they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot — 
thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Future, 
for Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other 
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters 
with a jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man 
had got out of the Centre of Truth — which did not need much 
demonstration — ^but had not got out of the Circumference, and 
that he was to be kept from flying out of the Circumference, 
and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting and 
seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


91 


with spirits went on — and it did a world of good which never 
became manifest. 

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel 
of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment 
had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would 
have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and 
sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved 
and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate 
honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, 
for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding 
wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved ; 
these golden fetters rang like precious little bells ; and what with 
that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, 

! there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his 

I devouring hunger far away. 

j Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keep- 
ing all things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy 
Ball that was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, 
through Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, 
the Tribunals of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), 
the Fancy Ball descended to the Common Executioner : who, in 
pursuance of the charm, was required to officiate “frizzled, pow- 
dered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps, and white silk stockings.” At 
the gallows and the wheel — the axe was a rarity — Monsieur 
Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother Professors 
of the provinces. Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call him, pre- 
sided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at Mon- 
seigneur’s reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year 
of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled 
hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, 
would see the very stars out ! 

Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and 
taken his chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to 
be thrown open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what 
cringing and fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation ! As 
to bowing down in body and spirit, nothing in that way was left 
for Heaven — which may have been one among other reasons why 
the worshippers of Monseigneur never troubled it. 

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper 
on one happy slavQ and a wave of the hand on another. Monsei- 
gneur affably passed through his rooms to the remote region of the 
Circumference of Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came 
back again, and so in due course of time got himself shut up in 
his sanctuary by the chocolate sprites, and was seen no more. 


92 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little 
storm, and the precious little bells went ringing down-stairs. 
There was soon but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with 
his hat under his arm and his snuft-box in his hand, slowly passed 
among the mirrors on his way out. 

“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on 
his way, and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “ to the 
Devil ! ” 

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had 
shaken the dust from his feet, and quietly walked down-stairs. 

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in 
manner, and with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent 
paleness ; every feature in it clearly defined ; one set expression 
on it. The nose, beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly 
pinched at the top of each nostril. In those two compressions, or 
dints, the only little change that the face ever showed, resided. 
They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would be 
occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pul- 
sation; then, they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the 
whole countenance. Examined with attention, its capacity of help- 
ing such a look was to be found in the line of the mouth, and 
the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too horizontal and 
thin ; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a handsome face, 
and a remarkable one. 

Its owner went down-stairs into the courtyard, got into his 
carriage, and drove away. Not many people had talked with him 
at the reception ; he had stood in a little space apart, and Mon- 
seigneur might have been warmer in his manner. It appeared, 
under the circumstances, rather agreeable to him to see the com- 
mon people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping 
from being run down. His man drove as if he w^ere charging an 
enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check 
into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had 
sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb 
age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patri- 
cian custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vul- 
gar in a barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to 
think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the 
common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they 
could. 

With a wild rattle and elatter, and an inhuman abandonment of 
consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage 
dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women 
screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutcliing 



THE STOPPAGE AT THE FOUNTAIN 








94 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


children out of its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a 
fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there 
Avas a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and 
plunged. 

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would 
not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and 
leave their wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened 
valet had got down in a hurry, and there were twenty hands at 
the horses’ bridles. 

“ What has gone wrong ? ” said Monsieur, calmly looking out. 

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among 
the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the foun- 
tain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a 
wild animal. 

“ Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis ! ” said a ragged and submissive 
man, “it is a child.” 

* “Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?” 

“Excuse me. Monsieur the Marquis — it is a pity — yes.” 

The fountain was a little removed ; for the street opened, where 
it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall 
man suddenly got up from the ground, and came running at the 
carriage. Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on 
his sword-hilt. 

“ Killed ! ” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending 
both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. 
“Dead!” 

Tlie people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. 
There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him 
but watchfulness and eagerness ; there was no visible menacing or 
anger. Neither did the people say anything ; after the first cry, 
they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of the sub- 
missive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme 
submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all, as 
if they had been mere rats come out of their holes. 

He took out his purse. 

“It is extraordinary to me,” _said he, “that you people cannot 
take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of 
you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have 
done my horses. See ! Give him that.” 

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the 
heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it 
fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, 
“ Dead 1 ” 

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


95 


pain. 


the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon 
his shoulder, sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, 
where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and 
moving gently about it. They were as silent, however, as the men. 

“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave 
man, my Gaspard ! It is better for the poor little plaything to 
die so,^ than to live. It has died in a moment without 
Could it have lived an hour as happily ? ” 

“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. 
“ How do they call you ? ” 

“ They call me Defarge.” 

“ Of what trade ? ” 

“ Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.” 

“ Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Mar- 
quis, throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. 
The horses there ; are they right ? ” 

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time. Mon- 
sieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven 
away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some 
common thing, and had paid for it, and could afford bo pay for it ; 
when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into his 
carriage, and ringing on its floor. 

“ Hold ! ” said Monsieur the Marquis. “ Hold the horses ! Who 
threw that ? ” 

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had 
stood, a moment before ; but the wretched father was grovelling 
on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood 
beside him was the figure of a dark stout woman, knitting. 

“You dogs ! ” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an un- 
changed front, except as to the spots on his nose ; “ I would ride 
over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. 
If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand 
were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.” 

So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experi- 
ence of what such a man could do to them, within the law and 
beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. 
Among the men, not one. But the woman who stood knitting 
looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was 
not for his dignity to notice it ; his contemptuous eyes passed over 
her, and over all the other rats ; and he leaned back in his seat 
again, and gave the word “ Go on ! ” 

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick 
succession ; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, 
the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the 


1)6 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, eame 
whirling by. The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, 
and they remained looking on for hours ; soldiers and police often 
passing between them and the spectacle, and making a barrier 
behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped. The 
father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away 
with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay 
on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the 
water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball — when the one woman 
who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the stead- 
fastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river 
ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death 
according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were 
sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball 
was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

MONSEIGNEUR IN THE COUNTRY. 

A BEAUTIFUL landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not 
abundant. Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, 
patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable 
substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the men and 
women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appear- 
ance of vegetating unwillingly ^ — a dejected disposition to give up, 
and wither away. 

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might 
have been lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, 
fagged up a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur 
the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding ; it was not 
from within ; it was occasioned by an external circumstance beyond 
his control — the setting sun. 

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when 
it gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. 
“It will die out,” said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, 
“directly.” 

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. 
When the heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the car- 
riage slid down, hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the 
red glow departed quickly ; the sun and the Marquis going down 
together, there was no glow left when the drag was taken off. 

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a ^ttle vil- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


97 


lage at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it,, 
a church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with 
a fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening 
objects as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of 
one who was coming near home. 

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor 
tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, 
poor fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people 
too. All its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at 
their doors, shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while 
many were at the fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any 
such small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten. Expressive 
sign^ of what made them poor, were not wanting ; the tax for the 
state, the tax for the church, the tax for the lord, tax local and 
tax general, were To be paid here and to be paid there, according 
to solemn inscription in the little village, until the wonder was, 
that there was any village left unswallowed. 

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and 
women, their choice on earth was stated in the prospect — Life on 
the lowest terms that could sustain it, down in the little village 
under the mill ; or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on 
the crag. 

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his 
postilions’ whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the 
evening air, as if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the 
Marquis drew up in his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. 
It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended their 
operations to look at him. He looked at them, and' saw in them, 
without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face 
and figure, that was to make the meagreness of Frenchmen an 
English superstition which should survive the truth through the 
best part of a hundred years. 

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces 
that drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before 
Monseigneur of the Court — only the difference was, that these 
faces drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate — when a griz- 
zled mender of the roads joined the group. 

“ Bring me hither that fellow ! ” said the Marquis to the courier. 

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows 
closed round to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the 
Paris fountain. 

“ I passed you on the road ? ” 

“ Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on 
the road.” 

H 


98 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both ? ” 

“ Monseigneur, it is true.” 

“ What did you look at, so fixedly ? ” 

“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.” 

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under 
the carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage. 
“ What man, pig ? And why look there ? ” 

“ Pardon, Monseigneur ; he swung by the chain of the shoe — 
the drag.” 

“ Who ?” demanded the traveller. 

“Monseigneur, the man.” 

“ May the Devil carry away these idiots ! How do you call the 
man ? You know all the men of this part of the country. Who 
was he ? ” 

“ Your clemency. Monseigneur ! He was not of this part of the 
country. Of all the days of my life, I never saw him.” 

“ Swinging by the chain ? To be suffocated ^ ” 

“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it. 
Monseigneur. His head hanging over — like this ! ” 

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, 
with his face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down ; 
then recovered himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow. 

“ What was he like ? ” 

“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered 
with dust, white as a spectre, tall as a spectre ! ” 

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd ; 
but all eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at 
Monsieur the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any 
spectre on his conscience. 

“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis, felicitously " sensible 
that such vermin were not to ruffle him, “ to see a thief accom- 
panying my carriage, and not open that great mouth of yours. 
Bah ! Put him aside. Monsieur Gabelle ! ” 

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing 
functionary united ; he had come out with great obsequiousness to 
assist at this examination, and had held the examined by the dra- 
pery of his arm in an official manner. 

“ Bah ! Go aside ! ” said Monsieur Gabelle. 

“ Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village 
to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.” 

“ Mon seigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.” 
“ Did he run away, fellow ? — where is that Accursed h ” 

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half- 
dozen particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


99 


Some half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out, 
and presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis. 

“ Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?” 

“ Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head 
first, as a person plunges into the river.” 

“ See to it, Gabelle. Go on ! ” 

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among 
the wheels, like sheep ; the wheels turned so suddenly that they 
were lucky to save their skins and bones ; they had very little else 
to save, or they might not have been so fortunate. 

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and 
up the rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. 
Gradually, it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering 
upward among the many sweet scents of a summer night. The 
postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in 
lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their 
whips ; the valet walked by the horses ; the courier was audible, 
trotting on ahead into the dim distance. 

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, 
with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it ; it was 
a poor figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, 
but he had studied the figure from the life — his own life, maybe 
— for it was dreadfully spare and thin. 

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long 
been growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneel- 
ing. She turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose 
quickly, and presented herself at the carriage-door. 

“ It is you. Monseigneur ! Monseigneur, a petition.” 

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable 
face. Monseigneur looked out. 

“ How, then ! What is it ? Always petitions ! ” 

“ Monseigneur. For the love of the great God ! My husband, 
the forester.” 

“ What of your husband, the forester ? Always the same with 
you people. He cannot pay something ? ” 

“ He has paid all. Monseigneur. He is dead.” 

“ Well ! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you ? ” 

“ Alas, no. Monseigneur ! But he lies yonder, under a little heap 
of poor grass.” 

“Well?” 

“ Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass ? ” 

“Again, well?” 

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was 
one of passionate grief j by turns she clasped her veinous and 


100 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


knotted hands together with wild energy, and laid one of theni 
on the carriage-door — tenderly, caressingly, as if~it had been a 
human breast, and could be expected to feel the appealing touch. 

“ Monseigneur, hear me ! Monseigneur, hear my petition ! My 
husband died of want ; so many die of want ; so many more will 
die of want.” 

“ Again, well ? Can I feed them ? ” 

“ Monseigneur, the good God knows ; but I don’t ask it. My 
petition is, that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s 
name, may be placed over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, 
the place will be quickly forgotten, it will never be found when I 
am dead of the same malady, I shall be laid under some other 
heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they increase 
so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur ! Monseigneur ! ” 

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had 
broken into a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, 
she was left far behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the 
Furies, was rapidly diminishing the league or two of distance that 
remained between him and his chateau. 

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and 
rose, as the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil- 
worn group at the fountain not far away ; to whom the mender of 
roads, with the aid of the blue cap without which he was nothing, 
still enlarged upon his man like a spectre, as long as they could 
bear it. By degrees, as they could bear no more, they dropped off 
one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements ; which lights, 
as the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed to 
have shot up into the sky instead of having been extinguished. 

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over- 
hanging trees, was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time ; and 
the shadow was exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his car- 
riage stopped, and the great door of his chateau was opened to him. 

“ Monsieur Charles, whom I expect ; is he arrived from England?” 

“ Monseigneur, not yet.” 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE Gorgon’s head. 

It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the 
Marquis, with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone 
sweeps of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal 
door. A stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


101 


and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and 
stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon’s head 
had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago. 

Up the broad flight of shallow steps. Monsieur the Marquis, 
flambeau preceded, went from his carriage, sufliciently disturbing 
the darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof 
of the great pile of stable building away among the trees. All 
else was so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the steps, and the 
other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a 
close room of state, instead of being in the open night-air. Other 
sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a 
fountain into its stone basin ; for, it was one of those dark nights 
that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long 
low sigh, and hold their breath again. 

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis 
crossed a hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives 
of the chase ; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding- 
whips, of which many a peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, 
had felt the weight when his lord was angry. 

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for 
the night. Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going 
on before, Avent up the staircase to a door in a corridor. This 
thrown open, admitted him to his own private apartment of three 
rooms : his bed-chamber and two others. High vaulted rooms 
with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the hearths for the 
burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the 
state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The fashion 
of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to break ■ — 
the fourteenth Louis — was conspicuous in their rich furniture ; 
but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of 
old pages in the history of France. 

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms ; a 
round room, in one of the ch§,teau’s four extinguisher-topped 
towers. A small lofty room, with its window’ wide open, and the 
wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so that the dark night only showed 
in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating with their broad lines 
of stone colour. 

“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper prepara- 
tion ; “ they said he was not arrived.” 

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur. 

“Ah ! It is not probable he will arrive to-night ; nevertheless, 
leave the table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.” 

In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down 
alone to his sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite 


102 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


to the window, and he had taken his soup, and was raising his 
glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he put it down. 

“ What is that ? ” he ealmly asked, looking with attention at 
the horizontal lines of black and stone colour. 

“ Monseigneur ? That ? ” 

“ Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.” 

It was done. 

“Well?” 

“ Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all 
that are here.” 

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked 
out into the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind 
him, looking round for instructions. 

“ Good,” said the imperturbable master. “ Close them again.” 

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. 
He was half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass 
in his hand, hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and 
came up to the front of the chateau. 

“ Ask who is arrived.” 

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few 
leagues behind Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had 
diminished the distance rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up 
with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard of Monseigneur, at 
the posting-houses, as being before him. 

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him 
then and there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little 
while he came. He had been known in England as Charles 
Darnay. 

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not 
shake hands. 

“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he 
took his seat at table. 

“ Yesterday. And you ? ” 

“ I come direct.” 

“ From London ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a 
smile. 

“ On the contrary ; I come direct.” 

“ Pardon me ! I mean, not a long time on the journey ; a long 
time intending the journey.” 

“ I have been detained by ” — the nephew stopped a moment 
in his answer — “ various business.” 

“ Without doubt,” said the polished uncle. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


103 


So long as a servant was present, no other, words passed between 
them. When coffee had been served and they were alone to- 
gether, the nephew, looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of 
the face that was like a fine mask, opened a conversation. 

“ I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object 
that took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected 
peril ; but it is a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death 
I hope it would have sustained me.” 

“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, 
to death.” 

“ I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “ whether, if it had carried 
me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me 
there.” 

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine 
straight lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the 
uncle made a graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a 
slight form of good breeding that it was not reassuring. 

“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you 
may have expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance 
to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me.” 

“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly. 

“ But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at 
him with deep distrust, “ I know that your diplomacy would stop 
me by any means, and would know no scruple as to means.” 

“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation 
in the two marks. “ Do me the favour to recall that I told you 
so, long ago.” 

“I recall it.” 

“ Thank you,” said the Marquis — very sweetly indeed. 

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical 
instrument. 

“ In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once 
your bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a 
prison in France here.” 

“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his 
coffee. “ Dare I ask you to explain ? ” 

“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and 
had not been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter 
de cachet would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.” 

“ It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the 
honour of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to 
that extent. Pray excuse me ! ” 

“ I perceive that, happily for me, the Eeceptionof the day before 
yiiatprdav was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew. 


104 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with 
refined politeness ; “I would not be sure of that. A good oppor- 
tunity for consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, 
might influence your destiny to far greater advantage than you in- 
fluence it for yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. 
I am, as you say, at a disadvantage. These little instruments of 
correction, these gentle aids to the power and honour of families, 
these slight favours that might so incommode you, are only to be 
obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so 
many, and they are granted (comparatively) to so few ! It used 
not to be so, but France in all such things is changed for the worse. 
Our not remote ancestors held the right of life and death over the 
surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such dogs have been 
taken out to be hanged ; in the next room (my bedroom), one fel- 
low, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing 
some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter — his daughter? 
We have lost many privileges ; a new philosophy has become the 
mode ; and the assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do 
not go so far as to say would, but might) cause us real inconven- 
ience. All very bad, very bad ! ” 

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his 
head ; as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a 
country still containing himself, that great means of regeneration. 

“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in 
the modern time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe 
our name to be more detested than any name in France.” 

“ Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “ Detestation of the high is 
the involuntary homage of the low.” 

“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face 
I can look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me 
with any deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.” 

“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the 
family, merited by the manner in which the family has sustained 
its grandeur. Hah ! ” And he took another gentle little pinch 
of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs. 

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered 
his eyes thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask 
looked at him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, 
closeness, and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer’s 
assumption of indifference. 

“ Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference 
of fear and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep 
the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to 
it, “shuts out the sky.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


105 


That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a pict- 
ure of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of 
fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could 
have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss 
to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder- wrecked 
ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that shut- 
ting out the sky in a new way — to wit, for ever, from the eyes of 
the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a 
hundred thousand muskets. 

“ Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “ I will preserve the honour 
and repose of the family, if you will not. But you must be 
fatigued. Shall we terminate our conference for the night ? ” 

“ A moment more.” 

“ An hour, if you please.” 

“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping 
the fruits of wrong.” 

“ We have done wrong ? ” repeated the Marquis, with an in- 
quiring smile, and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then 
to himself. 

“ Our family ; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much 
account to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father’s 
time, we did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature 
who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was. Why 
need I speak of my father’s time, when it is equally yours ? Can 
I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next 
successor, from himself?” 

“ Death has done that ! ” said the Marquis. 

“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “ bound to a system 
that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it ; seek- 
ing to execute the last request of my dear mother’s lips, and obey 
the last look of my dear mother’s eyes, which implored me to have 
mercy and to redress ; and tortured by seeking assistance and 
power in vain.” 

“ Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis, touch- 
ing him on the breast with his forefinger — they were now standing 
by the hearth — “ you will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.” 

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of 'his face, was 
cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking 
quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again 
he touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine 
point of a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him 
through the body, and said, 

“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which 
I have lived.” 


106 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


When he had said it, he took d culminating pinch of snuff, and 
put his box in his pocket. 

“ Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing 
a small bell on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But 
you are lost. Monsieur Charles, I see.” 

“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, 
sadly ; “I renounce them.” 

“ Are they both yours to renounce ? France may be, but is the 
property ? It is scarcely worth mentioning ; but, is it yet ? ” 

“ I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If 
it passed to me from you, to-morrow ” 

“ Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.” 

“ — or twenty years hence ” 

“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I 
prefer that supposition.” 

“ — I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is 
little to relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin ! ” 

“ Hah ! ” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room. 

“ To the eye it is fair enough, here ; but seen in its integrity, 
under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of 
waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hun- 
ger, nakedness, and suffering.” 

“ Hah ! ” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner. 

“ If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better 
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the 
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot 
leave it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endur- 
ance, may, in another generation, suffer less ; but it is not for me. 
There is a curse on it, and on all this land.” 

“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, 
under your new philosophy, graciously intend to live ? ” 

“ I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with 
nobility at their backs, may have to do some day — work.” 

“ In England, for example ? ” 

“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. 
The family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in 
no other.” 

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bedchamber to 
be lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communi- 
cation. The Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreat- 
ing step of his valet. 

“ England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you 
have prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to 
his nephew with a smile. 


I 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


107 


“ I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible 
I may be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.” 

^ “ They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. 
You know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there ? A Doctor ? ” 

‘‘Yes.” 

“ With a daughter ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!” 

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a 
secrecy in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to 
those words, which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. 
At the same time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, 
and the thin straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved 
with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic. 

“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. 
Yes. So commences the new philosophy I You are fatigued. Good 
night ! ” 

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone 
face outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The 
nephew looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the. door. 

“ Good night ! ” said the uncle. “ I look to the pleasure of 
seeing you again in the morning. Good repose I Light Monsieur 
my nephew to his chamber there I — And burn Monsieur my 
nephew in his bed, if you will,” he added to himself, before he 
rang his little bell again, and summoned his valet to his own bed- 
room. 

The valet come and gone. Monsieur the Marquis walked to and 
fro in his loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, 
that hot still night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered 
feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger ; — 
looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked 
sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger form was either 
just going off, or just coming on. 

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking 
again at the scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into 
his mind ; the slow toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the 
descent, the mill, the prison on the crag, the little village in the 
hollow, the peasants at the fountain, and the mender of roads with 
his blue cap pointing out the chain under the carriage. That 
fountain suggested the Paris fountain, the little bundle lying on 
the step, the women bending over it, and the tall man with his 
arms up, crying, “Dead ! ” 

“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to 
bed.” 


108 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let 
his thin gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night 
break its silence with a long sigh as he composed himself to 
sleep. 

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black 
night for three heavy hours ; for three heavy hours, the horses in 
the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl 
made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise con- 
ventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obsti- 
nate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down 
for them. 

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and 
human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the 
landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust 
on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its 
little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another ; 
the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that 
could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast 
asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved usually 
do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox 
may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed. 

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the 
fountain at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard — both melt- 
ing away, like the minutes that were falling from the spring of 
Time — through three dark hours. Then, the grey water of both 
began to be ghostly in the light, and the eyes of the stone faces of 
the chateau were opened. 

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the 
still trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, 
the water of the chMeau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the 
stone faces crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, 
and, on the weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed- 
chamber of Monsieur the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest 
song with all its might. At this, the nearest stone face seemed to 
stare amazed, and, with open mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked 
awe-stricken. 

Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. 
Casement windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people 
came forth shivering — chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then 
began the rarely lightened toil of the day among the village popula- 
tion. Some, to the fountain ; some, to the fields ; men and women 
here, to dig and delve ; men and women there, to see to the poor 
live stock, and lead the bony cows out, to such pasture as could be 
found by the roadside. In the church and at the Cross, a kneelim'- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


109 


figure or two ; attendant on the latter prayers, the led cow, trying 
for a breakfast among the weeds at its foot. 

The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke 
gradually and surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of 
the chase had been reddened as of old ; then, had gleamed tren- 
chant in the morning sunshine; now, doors and windows were 
thrown open, horses in their stables looked round over their shoul- 
ders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways, leaves 
sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs pulled hard at 
their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed. 

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the 
return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of 
the chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs ; nor the 
hurried figures on the terrace ; nor the booting and tramping here 
and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and 
riding away ? 

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, 
already at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day’s 
dinner (not much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth 
no crow’s while to peck at, on a heap of stones ? Had the birds, 
carrying some grains of it to a distance, dropped one over him as 
they sow chance seeds ? Whether or no, the mender of roads ran, 
on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill, knee-high in 
dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain. 

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about 
in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no 
other emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cov/s, 
hastily brought in and tethered to anything that would hold them, 
were looking stupidly on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing 
particularly repaying their trouble, which they had picked up in 
their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the chateau, and 
some of those of the posting-house, and all the taxing authorities, 
were armed more or less, and were crowded on the other side of the 
little street in a purposeless way, that was highly fraught with 
nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated into the 
midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting him- 
self in the breast with his blue cap. What did all' this portend, 
and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle 
behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said 
Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a 
new version of the German ballad of Leonora ^ 

It ])ortended that there was one stone face too many, up at the 
cliatea i. 

The Gorgon liad surveyed the building again in the night, and 


110 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


had added the one stone face wanting ; the stone face for which it 
had waited through about two hundred years. 

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was 
like a fine mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. 
Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it, was 
a knife. Round its hilt w^as a frill of paper, on which was scrawled : 

“ Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.” 


CHAPTER X. 

TWO PROMISES. 

More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and 
Mr. Charles Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher 
of the French language who was conversant with French literature. 
In this age, he would have been a Professor ; in that age, he was a 
Tutor. He read with young men who could find any leisure and 
interest for the study of a living tongue spoken all over the world, 
and he cultivated a taste for its stores of knowledge and fancy. He 
could write of them, besides, in sound English, and render them 
into sound English. Such masters were not at that time easily 
found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were to be, were 
not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had dropped 
out of Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a tutor, 
whose attainments made the student’s way unusually pleasant and 
profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to 
his work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay 
soon became known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, 
moreover, with the circumstances of his country, and those were of 
ever-growing interest. So, with great perseverance and untiring 
industry, he prospered. 

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of 
gold, nor to lie on beds of roses ; if he had had any such exalted 
expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected 
labour, and he found it, and did it, and made the best of it. In 
this, his prosperity consisted. 

A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he 
read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove 
a contraband trade in European languages, instead of conveying 
Greek and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time 
he passed in London. 

Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to 
these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Ill 


a man has invariably gone one way — Charles Dariiay’s way — the 
way of the love of a woman. 

He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He 
had never heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her 
compassionate voice ; he had never seen a face so tenderly beauti- 
ful, as hers when it was confronted with his own on the edge of 
the grave that had been dug for him. But, he had not yet spoken 
to her on the subject ; the assassination at the deserted chateau 
far away beyond the heaving water and the long, long, dusty roads 
— the solid stone chateau which had itself become the mere mist 
of a dream — had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so 
much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his 
heart. 

That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was 
again a summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college 
occupation, he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seek- 
ing an opportunity of opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It 
was the close of the summer day, and he knew Lucie to be out 
with Miss Pross. 

He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a 'window. 
The energy which had at once supported him under his old suffer- 
ings and aggravated their sharpness, had been gradually restored 
to him. He was now a very energetic man indeed, with great 
firmness of purpose, strength of resolution, and vigour of action. 
In his recovered energy he was sometimes a little fitful and sudden, 
as he had at first been in the exercise of his other recovered fac- 
ulties ; but, this had never been frequently observable, and had 
grown more and more rare. 

He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue 
with ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles 
Darnay, at sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his 
hand. 

“ Charles Darnay ! I rejoice to see you. We have been count- 
ing on your return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and 
Sydney Carton were both here yesterday, and both made you out 
to be more than due.” 

“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he 
answered, a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the 
Doctor. “ Miss Manette ” 

“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your 
return will delight us all. She has gone out on some household 
matters, but will soon be home.” 

“ Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the 
opportunity of her being from home, to beg to speak to you.” 


112 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


There was a blank silence. 

“ Yes ? ” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “ Bring your 
chair here, and speak on.” 

He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking 
on less easy. 

“I have had the happiness. Doctor Manette, of being so inti- 
mate, here,” so he at length began, “for some year and a half, that 
I hope the topic on which I am about to touch may not ” 

He was stayed by the Doctor’s putting out his hand to stop him. 
When he had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back : 

“ Is Lucie the topic ? ” 

“She is.” 

“ It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard 
for me to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.” 

“ It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love. 
Doctor Manette ! ” he said deferentially. 

There was another blank silence before her father rejoined : 

“I believe it. I do you justice ; I believe it.” 

His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that 
it originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that 
Charles Darnay hesitated. 

“ Shall I go on, sir ? ” 

Another blank. 

“Yes, go on.” 

“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know 
how earnestly I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing 
my secret heart, and the hopes and fears and anxieties with which 
it has long been laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your 
daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there 
were love in the world, I love her. You have loved yourself ; let 
your old love speak for me ! ” 

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on 
the ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, 
hurriedly, and cried : 

“ Not that, sir ! Let that be ! I adjure you, do not recall 
that ! ” 

His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in 
Charles Darnay’s ears long after he had ceased. He motioned 
with the hand he had extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to 
Darnay to pause. The latter so received it, and remained silent. 

“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after 
some moments. “ I do not doubt your loving Lucie ; you may be 
satisfied of it.” 

He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him. or 


A TALE OF, TAVO CITIES. 


113 




;■ 


raise his eyes. His chiu dropped upon- his hand, and his white 
hair overshadowed his face : 

“ Have you spoken to Lucie . 

“No.” ... / . ' ' ' ' ’ - ' 

“ Nor written'? j ^ ' 

“ Never. ’r , ^ ' 

“ It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self- 
denial is to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her 
father thanks you.” 

He offered his hand ; but his eyes did not go with it. 

“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know. 
Doctor Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, 
that between you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unu- 
sual, so touching, so belonging to the circumstances in which it has 
been nurtured, tWt it can have few parallels, even in the tender- 
ness between a father and child. I know. Doctor Manette — how 
can I fail to know — that, mingled with the affection and duty of 
a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart, 
towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know 
that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted 
to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and 
character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the early 
days in which you were lost to her. I know” perfectly well that 
if you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, 
yoii could hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred 
character than that in which you are always with her. I know 
that when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and 
woman, all in one, are round your neck. I know that in loving 
you she sees and loves her mother at her own age, sees and loves 
you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted, loves you through 
your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I have known 
this, night and day, since I have known you in your home.” 

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breath- 
ing was a little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of 
agitation. 

“ Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her 
and you with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and 
forborne, as long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have 
felt, and do even now feel, that to bring my love — even mine — 
between you, is to touch your history with something not quite so 
good as itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love 
her ! ” 

“ I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “ I have 
thought so before now. I believe it.” 


I 


114 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mourn- 
ful voice struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my fortune 
were so cast as that, being one day so happy as to make her my 
wife, I must at any time put any separation between her and you, 
I could or would breathe a word of what I now say. Besides that 
I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to be a baseness. 
If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance of years, 
harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my heart — if it ever 
had been there — if it ever could be there — I could not now 
touch this honoured hand.” 

He laid his own upon it as he spoke. 

“ No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from 
France ; like you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, 
and miseries ; like you, striving to live away from it by my own 
exertions, and trusting in a happier future ; I look only to sharing 
your fortunes, sharing your life and home, and being faithful to 
you to the death. Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as your 
child, companion, and friend ; but to come in aid of it, and bind 
her closer to you, if such a thing can be.” 

His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the 
touch for a moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands 
upon the arms of his chair, and looked up for the first time since 
the beginning of the conference. A struggle was evidently in his 
face ; a struggle with that occasional look which had a tendency 
in it to dark doubt and dread. 

“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that 
I thank you with all my heart, and will open all my heart — or 
nearly so. Have you any reason to bqlieve that Lucie loves you?” 

“None. As yet, none.” / 

“Is it the immediate object of this' confidence, that you may at 
once ascertain jlhat, with my knowledge?” 

“Not tven^o. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for 
weeks ; I might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness 
to-morrow.” 

“ Do you seek any guidance from me ? ” 

“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you 
might have it in your power, if you should deem it right, to give 
me some.” 

“ Do you seek any promise from me ? ” 

“ I do seek that.” 

“What is it?” 

“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. 
I well understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this 
moment in her innocent heart — do not tliink I have the presump- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


115 


j- ' 

tion to assume so much — I could retain no place in it against her 
love for her father.” 

“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved 
in it?” 

“ I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any 
suitor’s favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For 
which reason. Doctor Manette,” said Darnay, modestly but firmly, 
“I would not ask that word, to save my life.” 

“ I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close 
love, as well as out of wide division ; in the former case, they are 
subtle and delicate, and diificult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie 
is, in this one respect, such a mystery to me ; I can make no guess 
at the state of her heart.” 

“May I ask, sir, if you think she is ” As he hesitated, 

her father supplied the rest. 

“ Is sought by any other suitor ? ” 

“It is what I meant to say.” 

Her father considered a little before he answered : 

“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is 
here too, occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of 
these.” 

“ Or both,” said Darnay. 

“ I had not thought of both ; I should not think either, likely, v 
You want a promise from me. Tell me what it is.” 

“ It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, 
on her own part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before 
you, you will bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief 
in it. I hope you may be able to think so well of me, as to urge 
no influence against me. I say nothing more of my stake in this ; 
this is what I ask. The condition on which I ask it, and which you 
have an undoubted right to require, I will observe immediately.” 

“ I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “ without any condition. 

I believe your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have 
stated it. I believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to 
weaken, the ties between me and my other and far dearer self If 
she should ever tell me that you are essential to her perfect happi- 
ness, I will give her to you. If there were — Charles Darnay, if 
there were ” 

The young man had taken his hand gratefully ; their hands were 
joined as the Doctor spoke : 

“ — any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything what- 
soever, new or old, against the man she really loved — the direct 
responsibility thereof not lying on his head — they should all be 
obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me ; more to me 


116 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


than suflfering, more to me than wrong, more to me Well! 

This is idle talk.” 

So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so 
strange his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay 
felt his own hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and 
dropped it. 

“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking 
into a smile. “ What was it you said to me ? ” 

He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having 
spoken of a condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he 
answered : 

“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confi- 
dence on my part. My present name, though but slightly changed 
from my mother’s,, is not, as you will remember, my own. I wish 
to tell you what that is, and why I am in England.” 

“ Stop I ” said the Doctor of Beauvais. 

“ I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and 
have no secret from you.” 

“ Stop I ” ^ 

For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears ; 
for another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips. 

“ Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, 
if Lucie should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morn- 
ing. Do you promise ? ” 

“Willingly.” 

“ Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better 
she should not see us together to-night. Go I God bless you ! ” 

It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour 
later and darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the 
room alone — for Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs — and 
was surprised to find his reading-chair empty. 

“ My father ! ” she called to him. “ Fatlier dear ! ” 

Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering 
sound in his bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate! 
room, she looked in at his door and came running back frightened, 
crying to herself, with her blood all chilled, “ What shall I do ! 
What shall I do I ” 

Her uncertainty lasted but a moment ; she hurried back, and | 
tapped at his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased atj 
the sound of her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they 
walked up and down together for a long time. 

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that 
night. He slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and 
Ids old unfinished work, were all as usual. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


117 


CHAPTER XI. 


) 

p 


A COMPANION PICTURE. 


i ■ “ Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that selfsame night, or morn- 

ling, to his jackal ; “ mix another bowl of punch ; I have something 
; ito say to you.” 

Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night 
; before, and the night before that, and a good many nights in succes- 
' sion, making a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver’s papers before 
:the setting in of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at 
last ; the Stryver arrears were handsomely fetched up ; everything 
I jwas got rid of until November should come with its fogs atmos- 
1 ipheric and fogs legal, and bring grist to the mill again. 

Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much 
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him 
: through the night ; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had 
preceded the towelling ; and he was in a very damaged condition, 
M he now pulled his turban off and threw it into the basin in 
' which he had steeped it at intervals for the last six hours. 

“ Are you mixing that other bowl of punch ? ” said Stryver the 
portly, with his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the 
sofa where he lay on his back. 

“ I am.” 

“ Now, look here ! I am going to tell you something that will 
rather surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not 
: quite as shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.” 

“Do you?” 

“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now ? ” 

! “ I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she ? ” 

Ij “ Guess.” 

“ Do I know her ? ” 

! “ Guess.” 

^11“ I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with 
my brains frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to 
guess, you must ask me to dinner.” 

[ “Well then. I’ll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a 
‘sitting posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself iii- 
^telligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog.” 

' “And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are 
I such a sensitive and poetical spirit.” 

I “ Come ! ” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “ though I 
[don’t prefer any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope 
j I know better), still I am a tenderer sort of fellow than you:' 


118 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“You are a luckier, if you mean that.” 

“ I don’t mean that. I mean I am a man of more more ” 

“ Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton. 

“ Well ! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” 
said Stryver, inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, 
“ who cares more to be agreeable, who takes more pains to be 
agreeable, who knows better how to be agreeable, in a woman’s 
society, than you do.” 

“ Go on,” said Sydney Carton. 

“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his 
bullying way, “ I’ll have this out with you. You’ve been at Doctor 
Manette’s house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, 
I have been ashamed of your moroseness there ! Your manners 
have been of that silent and sullen and hang-dog kind, that, upon 
my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney ! ” 

“ It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the 
bar, to be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to 
be much obliged to me.” 

“You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, sfiouldering 
the rejoinder at him ; “no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you — and I 
tell you to your face to do you good — that you are a de-vilish ill-condi- 
tioned fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.” 

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed. 

“ Look at me ! ” said Stryver, squaring himself ; “I have less 
need to make myself agreeable than you have, being more inde- 
pendent in circumstances. Why do I do it ? ” 

“ I never saw you do it yet,” muttered Carton. 

“I do it because it’s politic ; I do it on principle. And look at 
me ! I get on.” 

“You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial inten- 
tions,” answered Carton, with a careless air ; “I wish you would 
keep to that. As to me — will you never understand that I am 
incorrigible ? ” 

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn. 

“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend’s 
answer, delivered in no very soothing tone. 

“ I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney 
Carton. “ Who is the la'dy ? ” 

“ Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you uncom- 
fortable, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostenta- 
tious friendliness for the disclosure he was about to make, “ because 
I know you don’t mean half you say ; and if you meant it all, it 
would be of no importance. I make this little preface, because you 
once mentioned the young lady to me in slighting terms.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


110 


“I did?” 

“ Certainly ; and in these chambers.” 

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent 
friend ; drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend. 

“You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. 
The young lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any 
sensitiveness or delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I 
might have been a little resentful of your employing such a desig- 
nation; but you are not. You want that sense altogether; there- 
fore I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I 
should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of mine, who 
had no eye for pictures : or of a piece of music of mine, who had 
no ear for music.” 

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by 
bumpers, looking at his friend. 

“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don’t 
care about fortune : she is a charming creature, and I have made 
up my mind to please myself : on the whole, I think I can afford 
to please myself She will have in me a man already pretty well 
off, and a rapidly rising man, and a man of some distinction : it is 
a piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of good fortune. 
Are you astonished ? ” 

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be 
astonished ? ” 

“You approve ? ” 

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “ Why should I not 
approve ? ” 

“ Well ! ” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than 
I fancied you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I 
thought you would be ; though, to be sure, you know well enough 
by this time that your ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong 
will. Yes, Sydney, I have had enough of this style of life, with 
no ^ther as a change from it ; I feel that it is a pleasant thing for 
a man to have a home when he feels inclined to go to it (when he 
doesn’t, he can stay away), and I feel that Miss Manette will tell 
well in any station, and will always do me credit. So I have 
made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to say a 
word to you about your prospects. You are in a bad way, you 
know ; you really are in a bad way. You don’t know the value 
of money, you live hard, you’ll knock up one of these days, and 
be ill and poor ; you really ought to think about a nurse.” 

. The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look 
twice as big as he was, and four times as offensive. 

“ Now, let me recommend you,” pursued Stryver, “ to look it in 


120 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


the face. I have looked it in the face, in my different way ; look 
it in the face, you, in your different way. Marry. Provide some- 
body to take care of you. Never mind your having no enjoyment 
of women’s society, nor understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find 
out somebody. Find out some respectable woman with a little 
property — somebody in the landlady way, or lodging-letting way 
— and marry her, against a rainy day. That’s the kind of thing 
for you. Now think of it, Sydney.” 

“ I’ll think of it,” said Sydney. 


CHAPTER XII. 

THE FELLOW OF DELICACY. 

Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous 
bestowal of good fortune on the Doctor’s daughter, resolved to 
make her happiness known to her before he left town for the Long 
Vacation. After some mental debating of the point, he came to 
the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the preliminaries 
done with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether he 
should give her his hand a week or two before Michaelmas Term, 
or in the little Christmas vacation between it and Hilary. 

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but 
clearly saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on sub- 
stantial worldly grounds — the only grounds ever worth taking into 
account — it was a plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He 
called himself for the plaintiff, there was no getting over his evi- 
dence, the counsel for the defendant threw up his brief, and the 
jury did not even turn to consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., 
was satisfied that no plainer case could be. 

Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a 
formal proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens ;,,that 
failing, to Ranelagh ; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved 
him to present himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind. 

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from 
the Temple, while the bloom of the Long Vacation’s infancy was 
still upon it. Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into 
Soho while he was yet on Saint Dunstan’s side of Temple Bar, 
bursting in his full-blown way along the pavement, to the jostle- 
ment of all weaker people, might have seen how safe and strong 
he was. 

His way taking him past Tellson’s, and he both banking at 
Tellson’s and knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


121 


Manettes, it entered Mr. Stryver’s mind to enter the bank, and 
reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness of the Soho horizon. So, he 
pushed open the door with the weak rattle in its throat, stumbled 
down the two steps, got past the two ancient cashiers, and shoul- 
dered himself into the musty back closet where Mr. Lorry sat at 
great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his 
window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything under 
the clouds were a sum. 

“ Halloa ! ” said Mr. Stryver. “ How do you do ? I hope you 
are well ! ” 

It was Stryver’s grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big 
for any place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson’s, 
that old clerks in distant corners looked up with looks of remon- 
strance, as though he squeezed them against the wall. The House 
itself, magnificently reading the paper quite in the far-off perspec- 
tive, lowered displeased, as if the Stryver head had been butted 
into its responsible waistcoat. 

The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he 
would recommend under the circumstances, “ How do you do, Mr. 
Stryver 1 How do you do, sir ? ” and shook hands. There was a 
peculiarity in his manner of shaking hands, always to be seen in 
any clerk at Tellson’s who shook hands with a customer when the 
House pervaded the air. He shook in a self-abnegating way, as 
one who shook for Tellson and Co. 

“ Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver ? ” asked Mr. Lorry, 
in his business character. 

“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. 
Lorry; I have come for a private word.” 

“ Oh indeed ! ” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his 
eye strayed to the House afar off*. 

“ I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially 
on the desk : whereupon, although it was a large double one, there 
appeared to be not half desk enough for him : “I am going to 
make'an offer of myself in marriage to your agreeable little friend. 
Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.” 

“ Oh dear me ! ” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking 
at his visitor dubiously. 

“ Oh dear me, sir ? ” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “ Oh dear 
you, sir ? What may your meaning be, Mr Lorry ? ” 

“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, 
friendly and appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, 
and — in short, my meaning is everything you could desire. But 

— really, you know, Mr. Stryver ” Mr. Lorry paused, and 

shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were com- 


122 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


pelled against his will to add, internally, “ you know there really 
is so much too much of you ! ” 

“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious 
hand, opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “ if I un- 
derstand you, Mr. Lorry, I’ll be hanged I ” 

Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards 
that end, and bit the feather of a pen. 

“ D — n it all, sir ! ” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not 
eligible ? ” 

“ Oh dear yes I Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible ! ” said Mr. Lorry. 
“ If you say eligible, you are eligible.” 

“ Am I not prosperous ? ” asked Stryver. 

“Oh I if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. 
Lorry. 

“ And advancing ? ” 

“ If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted 
to be able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.” 

“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry? ” demanded 
Stryver, perceptibly crestfallen. 

“Well ! I Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry. 

“ Straight 1 ” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk. 

“ Then I think I wouldn’t, if I was you.” 

“ Why ? ” said Stryver. “ Now, I’ll put you in a corner,” foren- 
sically shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business 
and bound to have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn’t 
you go ? ” 

“ Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “ I wouldn’t go on such an object 
without having some cause to believe that I should succeed.” 

“ D — n ME ! ” cried Stryver, “ but this beats everything.” 

Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the 
angry Stryver. 

“ Here’s a man of business — a man of years — a man of expe- 
rience — in a Bank,” said Stryver ; “and having summed up three 
leading reasons for complete success, he says there’s no re^on at 
all ! Says it with his head on ! ” Mr. Stryver remarked upon the 
peculiarity as if it would have been infinitely less remarkable if he 
had said it with his head off. 

“ When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young 
lady ; and when I speak of causes and reasons to make success 
probable, I speak of causes and reasons that will tell as such with 
the young lady. The young lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, 
mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the young lady. The young 
lady goes before all.” 

“ Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring 









124 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


his elbows, “ that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady 
at present in question is a mincing Fool ? ” 

“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. 
Lorry, reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that 
young lady from any lips ; and that if I knew any man — which 
I hope I do not — whose taste was so coarse, and whose temper 
was so overbearing, that he could not restrain himself from speak- 
ing disrespectfully of that young lady at this desk, not even Tellson’s 
should prevent my giving him a piece of my mind.” 

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. 
Stryver’s blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn 
to be angry ; Mr. Lorry’s veins, methodical as their courses could 
usually be, were in no better state now it was his turn. 

“ That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray i 
let there be no mistake about it.” 

Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and 
then stood hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably 
gave him the toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying : 

“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately 
advise me not to go up to Soho and olfer myself — ?7iyself, Stryver 
of the King’s Bench bar 1 ” 

“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver? ” 

“Yes, I do.” 

“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it cor- 
rectly.” 

“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed 
laugh, “that this — ha, ha! — beats everything past, present, and 
to come.” 

“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of 
business, I am not justified in saying anything about this matter, 
for, as a man of business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old 
fellow, who has carried Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted 
friend of Miss Manette and of her father too, and who has a great 
affection for them both, I have spoken. The confidence is not of 
my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I may not be right ?” 

“Not 1 1 ” said Stryver, whistling. “ I can’t undertake to find 
third parties in common sense ; I can only find it for myself. I 
suppose sense in certain quarters ; you suppose mincing bread-and- 
butter nonsense. It’s new to me, but you are right, I dare say.” 

“ What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself. 
And understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, 
“I will not — not even at Tellson’s — have it characterised for me 
by any gentleman breathing.” 

“ There 1 I beg your pardon 1 ” said Stryver. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


125 


“Granted. Thank yon. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to 
say : — it might be painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might 
be painful to Doctor Manette to have the task of being explicit with 
you, it might be very painful to Miss Manette to have the task of 
being explicit with you. You know the terms upon which I have 
the honour and happiness to stand with the family. If you please, 
committing you in no way, representing you in no way, I will under- 
take to correct my advice by the exercise of a little new observa- 
tion and judgment expressly brought to bear upon it. If you 
should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its soundness 
for yourself ; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied with it, 
and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is best 
spared. What do you say ? ” 

“ How long would you keep me in town ? ” 

“ Oh ! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho 
in the evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.” 

“ Then I say yes,” said Stryyer : “ I won’t go up there now, 
I am not so hot upon it as that comes to ; I say yes, and I shall 
expect you to look in to-night. Good morning.” 

Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing 
such a concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up 
against it bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost re- 
maining strength of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and 
feeble persons were always seen by the public in the act of bowing, 
and were popularly believed, when they had bowed a customer out, 
still to keep on bowing in the empty office until they bowed another 
customer in. 

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would 
not have gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid 
ground than moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large 
pill he had to swallow, he got it down. “And now,” said Mr. 
Stryver, shaking his forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, 
when it was down, “ my way out of this, is, to put you all in the 
wrong.” 

It was a . bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he 
found great relief “ You shall not put me in the wrong, young 
lady,” said Mr. Stryver ; “ I’ll do that for you.” 

Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten 
o’clock, Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered 
out for the purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than 
the subject of the morning. He even showed surprise when he 
saw Mr. Lorry, and was altogether in an absent and preoccupied 
state. 

“ Well ! ” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour 


126 A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

of bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. “ I have 
been to Soho.” 

“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! 
What am I thinking of I ” 

“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in 
the conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate 
my advice.” 

“ I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, 
“ that I am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the 
poor father’s account. I know this must aj^ays be a sore subject 
with the family ; let us say no more abouHt.” 

“ I don’t understand you,” said Mr. Lorry. 

“ I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smooth- 
ing and final way ; “ no matter, no matter.^’ 

“ But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged. 

“ No it doesn’t ; I assure you it doesn’t. Having supposed that 
there was sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition 
where there is not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mis- 
take, and no harm is done. Young women have committed similar 
follies often before, and have repented them in poverty and obscur- 
ity often before. In an unselfish aspect, I am soriy that the thing 
is dropped, because it would have been a bad thing for me in a 
worldly point of view ; in a selfish aspect, I am glad that the thing 
has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing for me in a 
worldly point of view — it is hardly necessary to say I could have 
gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not 
proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no 
means certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed 
myself to that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing 
vanities and giddinesses of empty-headed girls ; you must not 
expect to do it, or you will always be disappointed. Now, pray 
say no more about it. I tell you, I regret it on account of others, 
but I am satisfied on my own account. And I am really very 
much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you, and for giving 
me your advice ; you know the young lady better than I do ; you 
were right, it never would have done.” 

Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at 
Mr. Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance 
of showering generosity, forbearance, and good-will, on his erring 
head. “Make the best of it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no 
more about it ; thank you again for allowing me to sound you ; 
good night 1 ” 

Mr.* Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. 
Mr. Stryver was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


127 


CHAPTER XIII. 

THE FELLOW OF NO DELICACY. 

If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone 
in the house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a 
whole year, and had always been the same moody and morose 
lounger there. When he cared to talk, he talked well ; but, the 
cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a 
fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him. 

And yet he did care something for the streets that environed 
that house, and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. 
Many, a night he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when 
wine had brought no transitory gladness to him ; many a dreary 
daybreak revealed his solitary figure lingering there, and still lin- 
gering there when the first beams of the sun brought into strong 
relief, removed beauties of architecture in spires of churches and 
lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense of 
better things, else forgotten and unattainable, into his mind. Of 
late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known him more 
scantily than ever ; and often when he had thrown himself upon it 
no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted 
that neighbourhood. 

On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his 
jackal that “ he had thought better of that marrying matter ”) 
had carried his delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and 
scent of flowers in the City streets had some waifs of goodness in 
them for the worst, of health for the sickliest, and of youth for the 
oldest, Sydney’s feet still trod those stones. From being irresolute 
and purposeless, his feet became animated by an intention, and, in 
the working out of that intention, they took him to the Doctor’s 
door. 

He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. 
She had never been quite at her ease with him, and received him 
with some little embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. 
But, looking up at his face in the interchange of the first few 
common-places, she observed a change in it. 

“ I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton ! ” 

“No. But the life I lead. Miss Manette, is not conducive to 
health. What is to be expected of, or by, such profligates ? ” 

“Is it not — forgive me ; I have begun the question on my lips 
— a pity to live no better life 1 ” 

“ God knows it is a shame ! ” 

“ Then why not change it 1 ” 


128 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to 
see that there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice 
too, as he answered : 

“ It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I 
shall sink lower, and be worse.” 

He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his 
hand. The table trembled in the silence that followed. 

She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He 
knew her to be so, without looking at her, and said : 

“Pray forgive me. Miss Manette. I break down before the 
knowledge of what I want to say to you. Will you hear me ? ” 

“ If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it would make you 
happier, it would make me very glad ! ” 

“ God bless you for your sweet compassion ! ” 

He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily. 

“ Don’t be afraid to hear me. Don’t shrink from anything I say. 
I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.” 

“ No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still 
be ; lam sure that you might be much, much worthier of yourself.” 

“Say of you. Miss Manette, and although I know better — 
although in the mystery of my own wretched heart I know better 

— I shall never forget it ! ” 

She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed 
despair of himself which made the interview unlike any* other that 
could have been holden. 

“If it had been possible. Miss Manette, that you could have 
returned the love of the man you see before you — self-flung away, 
wasted, drunken, poor creature of misuse as you know him to be 

— he would have been conscious this day and hour, in spite of his 
happiness, that he would bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow 
and repentance, blight you, disgrace you, pull you down mth him. 
I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me ; I ask 
for none ; I am even thankful that it cannot be.” 

“ Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton ? Can I not recall 
you — forgive me again ! — to a better course 1 Can I in no way 
repay your confidence? I know this is a confidence,” she modestly 
said, after a little hesitation, and in earnest tears, “I know you 
would say this to no one else. Can I turn it to no good account 
for yourself, Mr. Carton ? ” 

He shook his head. 

“To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me 
through a very little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I 
wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. 
In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


129 


of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by 
you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. 
Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought 
would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old 
voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. 
I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shak- 
ing off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. 
A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper 
where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” 

“ Will nothing of it remain ? 0 Mr. Carton, think again ! 

Try again ! ” 

“ No, Miss Manette ; all through it, I have known myself to be 
quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have 
still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mas- 
tery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire — a fire, 
however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, 
lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.” 

“ Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more 
unhappy than you were before you knew me ” 

“ Don’t say that. Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed 
me, if anything could. You will not be the cause of my becom- 
ing worse.” 

“ Since the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events, 
attributable to some influence of mine — this is what I mean, if 
I can make it plain — can I use no influence to serve you ? Have 
I no power for good, with you, at all ? ” 

“ The utmost good that I am capable of now. Miss Manette, I 
have come here to realise. . Let me carry through the rest of my 
misdirected life, the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, 
last of all the world ; and that there was something left in me at 
this time which you could deplore and pity.” 

“ Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fer- 
vently, with all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. 
Carton ! ” 

“Entreat me to believe it no more. Miss Manette. I have 
proved myself, and I know better. I distress you ; I draw fast to 
an end. Will you let me believe, when I recall this day, that the 
last confidence of my life was reposed in your pure and innocent 
breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by no one ^ ” 

“If that will be a consolation to you, yes.” 

“ Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you ?” 

“ Mr. Carton,” she answered, ' after an agitated pause, “ the 
secret is yours, not mine ; and I promise to respect it.” 

“ Thank you. And again, God bless you.” 

K 


130 


A TALE OF TWO CITIE^. 


He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door. 

“ Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resum- 
ing this conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never 
refer .to it again. If I were dead, that could not be surer than it 
is henceforth. In the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the 
one good remembrance — and shall thank and bless you for it — 
that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and that my 
name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried in your heart. 
May it otherwise be light and happy ! ” 

He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and 
it was so sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how 
much he every day kept down and perverted, that Lucie Manette 
wept mournfully for him as he stood looking back at her. 

“Be comforted !” he said, “I am not worth such feeling. Miss 
Manette. An hour or two hence, and the low companions and low 
habits that I scorn but yield to, will render me less worth such 
tears as those, than any wretch who creeps along the streets. Be 
comforted ! But, within myself, I shall always be, towards you, 
what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have here- 
tofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make to you, is, 
that you will believe this of me.” 

“I will, Mr. Carton.” 

“ My last supplication of all, is this ; and with it, I will relieve 
you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in uni- 
son, and between whom and you there is an impassable space. It 
is useless to say it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, 
and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were 
of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of 
sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those 
dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, 
as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the 
time will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed 
about you — ties that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly 
to the home you so adorn — the dearest ties that will ever grace 
and gladden you. 0 Miss Manette, when the little picture of a 
happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own 
bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then 
that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love 
beside you ! ” 

He said, “ Farewell ! ” ^^aid a last “ God bless you ! ” and left 
her. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


131 


CHAPTER XIV. 

THE HONEST TRADESMAN. 

To the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in 
Fleet Street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and 
variety of objects in movement were every day presented. Who 
could sit upon anything in Fleet Street during the busy hours of 
the day, and not be dazed and deafened by two immense proces- 
sions, one ever tending westward with the sun, the other ever tend- 
ing eastward from the sun, both ever tending to the plains beyond 
the range of red and purple where the sun goes down ! 

With his straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher sat watching the 
two streams, like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries 
been on duty watching one stream — saving that Jerry had no 
expectation of their ever running dry. Nor would it have been 
an expectation of a hopeful kind, since a small part of his income 
was derived from the pilotage of timid women (mostly of a full 
habit and past the middle term of life) from Tellson’s side of the 
tides to the opposite shore. Brief as such companionship was in 
every separate instance, Mr. Cruncher never failed to become so 
interested in the lady as to express a strong desire to have the 
honour of drinking her very good health. And it was from the 
gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this benevolent 
purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed. 

Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and 
mused in the sight of men. Mr. Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a 
public place, but not being a poet, mused as little as possible, and 
looked about him. 

It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds 
were few, and belated women few, and when his affairs in general 
were so unprosperous as to awaken a strong suspicion in his breast 
that Mrs. Cruncher must have been “flopping ” in some pointed 
manner, when an unusual concourse pouring down Fleet Street 
westward, attracted his attention. Looking that way, Mr. Cruncher 
made out that some kind of funeral was coming along, and that 
there was popular objection to this funeral, which engendered 
uproar. 

“Young Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his offspring, 
“it’s a buryin’.” 

“ Hooroar, father ! ” cried Young Jerry. 

The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysteri- 
ous significance. The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he 
watched his opportunity, and smote the young gentleman on the ear. 


182 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ What d’ye mean ? What are you hooroaring at ? What do 
you want to conwey to your own father, you young Eip ? This 
boy is a getting too many for me I ” said Mr. Cruncher, surveying 
him. “ Him and his hooroars ! Don’t let me hear no more of you, 
or you shall feel some more of me. D’ye hear ? ” 

“ I warn’t doing no harm,” Young Jerry protested, rubbing his 
cheek. 

“Drop it then,” said Mr. Cruncher; “I won’t have none of 
your no harms. Get a top of that there seat, and look at the 
crowd.” 

His son obeyed, and the crowd approached ; they were bawling 
and hissing round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in 
which mourning coach there was only one mourner, dressed in the 
dingy trappings that were considered essential to the dignity of the 
position. The position appeared by no means to please him, how- 
ever, with an increasing rabble surrounding the coach, deriding him, 
making grimaces at him, and incessantly groaning and calling out ; 
“Yah! Spies! Tstj Yaha ! Spies!” with many compliments 
too numerous and forcible to repeat. 

Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. 
Cruncher ; he always pricked up his senses, and became excited, 
when a funeral passed Tellson’s. Naturally, therefore, a funeral 
with this uncommon attendance excited him greatly, and he asked 
of the first man who ran against him ; 

“ What is it, brother ? What’s it about ? ” 

“ I don’t know,” said the man. “ Spies ! Yaha ! Tst ! Spies ! ” 
He asked another man. “ Who is it ? ” 

“/ don’t know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his 
mouth nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with 
the greatest ardour, “ Spies ! Yaha ! Tst, tst ! Spi-ies ! ” 

At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, 
tumbled against him, and from this person he learned that the 
funeral was the funeral of one Roger Cly. 

“Was He a spy?” asked Mr. Cruncher. 

“ Old Bailey spy,” returned his informant. “ Yaha ! Tst ! Yah ! 
Old Bailey Spi-i-ies ! ” 

“ Why, to be sure ! ” exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at 
which he had assisted. “ I’ve seen him. Dead, is he ? ” 

“Dead as mutton,” returned the other, “and can’t be too dead. 
Have ’em out, there ! Spies ! Pull ’em out, there ! Spies ! ” 

The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea, 
that the crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating 
the suggestion to have ’em out, and to pull ’em out, mobbed the 
two vehicles so closely that they came to a stop. On the crowd’s 




THE SPY^S FUNERAL 





134 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


opening the coach doors, the one mourner scuffled out of himself 
and was in their hands for a moment ; but he was so alert, and 
made such good use of his time, that in another moment he was 
scouring away up a bye-street, after shedding his cloak, hat, long 
hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and other symbolical tears. ^ 

These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with 
great enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their 
shops ; for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a 
monster much dreaded. They had already got the length of open- 
ing the hearse to take the coffln out, when some brighter genius 
proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst gen- 
eral rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this sug- 
gestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was 
immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out, while as many 
people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any exercise of 
ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers was 
Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head 
from the observation of Tellson’s, in the further corner of the 
mourning coach. 

The officiating undertakers made some protest against these 
changes in the ceremonies ; but, the river being alarmingly near, and 
several voices remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bring- 
ing refractory members of the profession to reason, the protest was 
faint and brief. The remodelled procession started, with a chim- 
ney-sweep driving the hearse — advised by the regular driver, who 
was perched beside him, under close inspection, for the purpose — 
and with a pieman, also attended by his cabinet minister, driving 
the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street character of 
the time, was impressed as an additional ornament, before the 
cavalcade had gone far down the Strand ; and his bear, who was 
black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to that part 
of the procession in which he walked. 

Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite 
caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruit- 
ing at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its des- 
tination was the old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. 
It got there in course of time ; insisted on pouring into the burial- 
ground ; finally, accomplished the interment of the deceased Roger 
Cly in its own way, and highly to its own satisfaction. 

The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the neces- 
sity of providing some other entertainment for itself, another 
brighter genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of 
impeaching casual passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking 
vengeance on them. Chase was given to some scores of inoffensive 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


135 


persons who had never been near the Old Bailey in their lives, in 
the realisation of this fancy, and they were roughly hustled and 
maltreated. The transition to the sport of window-breaking, and 
thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy and natural. 
At last, after several hours, when sundry summer-houses had been 
pulled down, and some area-railings had been torn up, to arm the 
more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the Guards were 
coming. Before this rumour, the crowd gradually melted away, 
and perhaps the Guards came, and perhaps they never came, and 
this was the usual progress of a mob. 

Mr. Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had 
remained behind in the churchyard, to confer and condole with the 
undertakers. The place had a soothing influence on him. He 
procured a pipe from a neighbouring public-house, and smoked it, 
looking in at the railings and maturely considering the spot. 

“Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual 
way, “ you see that there Cly that day, and you see with your own 
eyes that he was a young ’un and a straight made \m.” 

Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he 
turned himself about, that he might appear, before the hour of clos- 
ing, on his station at Tellson’s. Whether his meditations on mor- 
tality had touched his liver, or whether his general health had been 
previously at all amiss, or whether he desired to show a little atten- 
tion to an eminent man, is not so much to the purpose, as that he 
made a short call upon his medical adviser — a distinguished sur- 
geon — on his way back. 

Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported 
No job in his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came 
out, the usual watch was set, and Mr. Cruncher and his son went 
home to tea. 

•“Now, I tell you where it is!” said Mr. Cruncher to his 
wife, on entering. “ If, as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes 
wrong to-night, I shall make sure that you’ve been praying again 
me, and I shall work you for it just the same as if I seen you do it.” 

The dejecfed Mrs. Cruncher shook her head. 

“ Why, you’re at it afore my face 1 ” said Mr. Cruncher, with 
signs of angry apprehension. 

“ I am saying nothing.” 

“ Well, then ; don’t meditate nothing. You might as well flop 
as meditate. You may as well go again me one way as another. 
Drop it altogether.” 

“Yes, Jerry.” 

“ Yes, Jerry,” repeated Mr. Cruncher sitting down to tea. “ Ah ! 
It is yes, Jerry. That’s about it. You may say yes, Jerry.” 


136 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Mr. Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corrobo- 
rations, but made use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to 
express general ironical dissatisfaction. 

“You and your yes, Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, taking a bite out 
of his bread-and-butter, and seeming to help it down with a large 
invisible oyster out of his saucer. “ Ah ! I think so. I believe 
you.” 

“ You are going out to-night ? ” asked his decent wife, when he 
took another bite. 

“Yes, I am.” 

“ May I go with you, father ? ” asked his son, briskly. 

“No, you mayn’t. I’m a going — as your mother knows — 
a fishing. That’s where I’m going to. Going a fishing.” 

“Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don’t it, father?” 

“ Never you mind.” 

“ Shall you bring any fish home, father ? ” 

“If I don’t, ’you’ll have short commons, to-morrow,” returned 
that gentleman, shaking his head ; “ that’s questions enough for 
you; I ain’t a going out, till you’ve been long abed.” 

He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to 
keeping a most vigilant watch on Mrs. Cruncher, and sullenly 
holding her in conversation that she might be prevented from 
meditating any petitions to his disadvantage. With this view, he 
urged his son to hold her in conversation also, and led the unfort- 
unate woman a hard life by dwelling on any causes of complaint 
he could bring against her, rather than he would 'leave her for a 
moment to her own reflections. The devoutest person could have 
rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an honest prayer 
than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a professed 
unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story. 

“ And mind you ! ” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games to-morrow ! 
If I, as a honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat 
or two, none of your not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If 
I, as a honest tradesman, am able to provide a little beer, none of 
your declaring on water. W'hen you go to Rome, do al; Rome'does. 
Rome will be a ugly customer to you, if you don’t. /’m your 
Rome, you know.” 

Then he began grumbling again : 

“ With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink ! 
I don’t know how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink 
here, by your flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look 
at your boy : he is your’n, ain’t he ? He’s as thhi as a lath. Do 
you call yourself a mother, and not know that a mother’s first duty 
is to blow her boy out ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


137 


This touched young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his 
mother to perform her first duty, and, whatever else she did or 
neglected, above all things to lay especial stress on the discharge 
of that maternal function so affectingly and delicately indicated 
by his other parent. 

Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until 
Young Jerry was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar 
injunctions, obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches 
of the night with solitary pipes, and did not start upon his excursion 
until nearly one o’clock. Towards that small and ghostly hour, he 
rose up from his chair, took a key out of his pocket, opened a locked 
cupboard, and brought forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient size, a 
rope and chain, and other fishing tackle of that nature. Disposing 
these articles about him in skilful manner, he bestowed a parting 
defiance on Mrs. Cruncher, extinguished the light, and went out. 

Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he 
went to bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the 
darkness he followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, 
followed down the court, followed out into the streets. He was 
in no uneasiness concerning his getting into the house again, for it 
was full of lodgers, and the door stood ajar all night. 

Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of 
his father’s honest calling. Young Jerry, keeping as close to house 
fronts, walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, 
held his honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering 
Northward, had not gone far, when he was joined by another 
disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two trudged on together. 

Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond 
the winking lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and 
were out upon a lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up 
here — and that so silently, that if Young Jerry had been super- ♦ 
stitious, he might have supposed the second follower of the gentle 
craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself into two. 

The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three 
stopped under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the 
bank was a low brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the 
shadow of bank and wall the three turned out of the road, and up 
a blind lane, of which the wall — there, risen to some eight or ten 
feet high — formed one side. Crouching down in a corner, peep- 
ing up the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw, was the 
form of his honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery 
and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, 
and then the second fisherman got over, and then the third. They 
all dropped softly on the ground within the gate, and lay there a 


138 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


little — listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on their hands 
and knees. 

It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate : which he did, 
holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and 
looking in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some 
rank grass ! and all the gravestones in the churchyard — it was a 
large churchyard that they were in — looking on like ghosts in 
white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost of a 
monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and 
stood upright. And then they began to fish. 

They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured 
parent appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great 
corkscrew. Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard, 
until the awful striking of the church clock so terrified Young 
Jerry, that he made off, with his hair as stiff as his father’s. 

But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, 
not only stopped him in his running away, but lured him back 
again. They were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in 
at the gate for the second time ; but, now they seemed to have got 
a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound down below, 
and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow 
degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the 
surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, 
when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it 
open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made 
ofi' again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more. 

He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary 
than breath, it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one 
highly desirable to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that 
the coffin he had seen was running after him ; and, pictured as 
^ hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its narrow end, always 
on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side — per- 
haps taking his arm — it was a pursuer to shun. It was an in- 
consistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the 
whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway 
to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out Pf them 
like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without tail and wings. It hid in door- 
ways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and draw- 
ing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into 
shadows on the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. 

All this time it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on 
him, so that when the boy got to his own door he had reason i 
for being half dead. And even then it would not leave him, but I 
followed him up-stairs with a bump on every stair, scrambled into 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


139 


bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on his breast 
when he fell asleep. 

From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was 
awakened after daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his 
father in the family room. Something had gone wrong with him ; 
at least, so Young Jerry inferred, from the circumstance of his hold- 
ing Mrs. Cruncher by the ears, and knocking the back of her head 
against the head-board of the bed. 

“ I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.” 

“Jerry, Jeriy, Jerry ! ” his wife implored. 

“ You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry, 
“ and me and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey ; 
why the devil don’t you 1 ” 

“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, 
with tears. 

“ Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business ? Is 
it honouring your husband to dishonour his business ? Is it obey- 
ing your husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his busi- 
ness ? ” 

“You hadn’t taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.” 

“It’s enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife 
of a honest tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with 
calculations when he took to his trade or when he didn’t. A 
honouring and obeying wife would let his trade alone altogether. 
Call yourself a religious woman? If you’re a religious woman, 
give me a irreligious one ! You have no more nat’ral sense of duty 
than the bed of this here Thames river has of a pile, and similarly 
it must be knocked into you.” 

The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and ter- 
minated in the honest tradesman’s kicking off his clay-soiled boots, 
and lying down at his length on the floor. After taking a timid 
peep at him lying on his back, with his rusty hands under his 
head for a pillow, his son lay down too, and fell asleep again. 

There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. 
Mr. Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an 
iron pot-lid by him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs. 
Cruncher, in case he should observe any symptoms of her saying 
Grace. He was brushed and washed at the usual hour, and set 
off with his son to pursue his ostensible calling. 

Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father’s 
side along sunny and crowded Fleet Street, was a very different 
Young Jerry from him of the previous night, running home through 
darkness and solitude from his grim pursuer. His cunning was 
fresh with the day, and his qualms were gone with the night — in 


•140 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


which particulars it is not improbable that he had compeers in 
Fleet Street and the City of London, that fine morning. 

“ Father,’' said Young Jerry, as they walked along : taking care 
to keep at arm’s length and to have the stool well between them : 
“ what’s a Resurrection-Man?” 

Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he an- 
swered, “ How should I know ? ” 

“ I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy. 

“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and 
lifting off his hat to give his spikes free play, “he’s a tradesman.” 

“ What’s his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry. 

“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his 
mind, “ is a branch of Scientific goods.” 

“ Persons’ bodies, ain’t it, father ? ” asked the lively boy. 

“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher. 

“ Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I’m 
quite growed up 1 ” 

Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and 
moral way. “It depends upon how you dewelop your talents. 
Be careful to dewelop your talents, and never to say no more than 
you can help to nobody, and there’s no telling at the present time 
what you may not come to be fit for.” As Young Jerry, thus 
encouraged, went on a few yards in advance, to plant the stool in 
the shadow of the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to himself: “Jerry, 
you honest tradesman, there’s hopes wot that boy will yet be a 
blessing to you, and a recompense to you for his mother ! ” 


CHAPTER XV. 

KNITTING. 

There had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of 
Monsieur Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the morning, sallow 
faces peeping through its barred window^s had descried other faces 
within, bending over measures of wine. Monsieur Defarge. sold a 
very thin wine at the best of times, but it would seem to have been 
an unusually thin wine that he sold at this time. A sour wine, 
moreover, or a souring, for its influence on the mood of those who 
drank it was to make them gloomy. No vivacious Bacchanalian 
flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur Defarge : but, a 
smouldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in the dregs 
of it. 

This had been the third morning in succession, on which there 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


141 


had been early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. 
It had begun on Monday, and here was Wednesday come. There 
had been more of early brooding than drinking ; for, many men 
had listened and whispered and slunk about there from the time 
of the opening of the door, who could not have laid a piece 
of money on the counter to save their souls. These were to 
the full as interested in the place, however, as if they could have 
commanded whole barrels of wine ; and they glided from seat to 
seat, and from corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, 
with greedy looks. 

Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of 
the wine-shop was not visible. He was not missed ; for, nobody 
who crossed the threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him, 
nobody wondered to see only Madame Defarge in her seat, presid- 
ing over the distribution of wine, with a bowl of battered small 
coins before her, as much defaced and beaten out of their original 
impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose ragged 
pockets they had come. 

A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were 
perhaps observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as 
they looked in at every place, high and low, from the king’s palace 
to the criminars gaol. Games at cards languished, players at 
dominoes musingly built towers with them, drinkers drew figures 
on the tables with spilt drops of wine, Madame Defarge herself 
picked out the pattern on her sleeve with her toothpick, and saw 
and heard something inaudible and invisible a long way off. 

Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until mid-day. 
It was high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his 
streets and under his swinging lamps ; of whom, one was Monsieur 
Defarge : the other a member of roads in a blue cap. All adust 
and athirst, the two entered the wine-shop. Their arrival had 
lighted a kind of fire in the breast of Saint Antoine, fast spread- 
ing as they came along, whicli stirred and flickered in flames of 
faces at most doors and windows. Yet, no one had followed them, 
and no man spoke when they entered the wine-shop, though the eyes 
of every man there were turned upon them. 

“Good day, gentlemen !” said Monsieur Defarge. 

It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It 
elicited an answering chorus of “ Good day ! ” 

“It is bad weather, gentlemen,” said Defarge, shaking his head. 

Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all 
cast down their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up 
and went out. 

“ My wife,” said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge ; 


142 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ I have travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, 
called Jacques. I met him — by accident — a day and half’s 
journey out of Paris. He is a good child, this mender of roads, 
called Jacques. Give him to drink, my wife ! ” 

A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine 
before the mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap 
to the company, and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried 
some coarse dark bread ; he ate of this between whiles, and sat 
munching and drinking near Madame Defarge’s counter. A third 
man got up and went out. 

Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine — but, he 
took less than was given to the stranger, as being himself a man 
to whom it was no rarity — and stood waiting until the country- 
man had made his breakfast. He looked at no one present, and 
no one now looked at him ; not even Madame Defarge, who had 
taken up her knitting, and was at work. 

“ Have you finished your repast, friend ? ” he asked, in due season. 

“Yes, thank you.” 

“ Come, then ! You shall see the apartment that I told you 
you could occupy. It will suit you to a marvel.” 

Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a 
courtyard, out of the courtyard up a steep staircase, out of the 
staircase into a garret, — formerly the garret where a white-haired 
man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making 
shoes. 

No white-haired man was there now ; but, the three men w^ere 
there who had gone out of the wine-shop singly. And between 
them and the white-haired man afar off, was the one small link, 
that they had once looked in at him through the chinks in the 
wall. 

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice : 

“Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three ! This is the wit- 
ness encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will 
tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five ! ” 

The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy fore- 
head with it, and said, “ Where shall I commence, monsieur ? ” 

“Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge’s not unreasonable reply, 
“ at the commencement.” 

“I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a 
year ago this running summer, underneath the carriage of the 
Marquis, hanging by the chain. Behold the manner of it. I 
leaving my work on the road, the sun going to bed, the carriage 
of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he hanging by the chain 
— like this.” 


A 



THE WINE-SIIOP 






144 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance ; 
in which he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it 
had been the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of 
his village during a whole year. 

Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man 
before ? 

“Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpen- 
dicular. 

Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then ? 

“By his tall figure,” said the mender of roads, softly, and with 
his finger at his nose. “When Monsieur the Marquis demands 
that evening, ‘ Say, what is he like ? ’ I make response, ‘ Tall as 
a spectre.’ ” 

“You should have said, short as a dwarf,” returned Jacques 
Two. 

“ But what did I know ? The deed was not ^then accomplished, 
neither did he confide in me. Observe ! Under those circum- 
stances even, I do not offer my testimony. Monsieur the Marquis 
indicates me with his finger, standing near our little fountain, and 
says, ‘ To me ! Bring that rascal ! ’ My faith, messieurs, I offer 
nothing.” 

“He is right there, Jacques,” murmured Defarge, to him who 
had interrupted. “ Go on ! ” 

“ Good ! ” said the mender of roads, with an air of mysteiy. 
“The tall man is lost, and he is sought — how many months^ 
Nine, ten, eleven?” 

“No matter, the number,” said Defarge. “He is well hidden, 
but at last he is unluckily found. Go on ! ” 

“I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again 
about to go to bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my 
cottage down in the village below, where it is already dark, when 
I raise my eyes, and see coming over the hill six soldiers. In the 
midst of them is a tall man with his arms bound — tied to his 
sides — like this ! ” 

With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with 
his elbows bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted 
behind him. 

“ I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the 
soldiers and their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, 
where any spectacle is well worth looking at), and at first, as they 
approach, I see no more than that they are six soldiers with a tall 
man bound, and that they are almost black to my sight — except 
on the side of the sun going to bed, where they have a red edge, 
messieurs. Also, I see that their long shadows are on the hollow 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


145 


ridge on the opposite side of the road, and are on the hill above it, 
and are like the shadows of giants. Also, I see that they are 
covered with dust, and that the dust moves with them as they 
come, tramp, tramp ! But when they advance quite near to me, 
I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would 
be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, 
as on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the 
same spot ! ” 

He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he 
saw it vividly ; perhaps he had not seen much in his life. 

“ I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man ; he 
does not show the soldiers that he recognises me ; we do it, and 
we know it, with our eyes. ‘ Come on ! ’ says the chief of that 
company, pointing to the village, ‘ bring him fast to his tomb ! ’ 
and they bring him faster. I follow. His arms are swelled 
because of being bound so tight, his wooden shoes are large and 
clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and consequently 
slow, they drive him with their guns — like this ! ” 

He imitated the action of a man’s being impelled forward by the 
butt-ends of muskets. 

“As. they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. 
They laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered 
with dust, but he cannot touch it ; thereupon they laugh again. 
They bring him into the village ; all the village runs to look ; they 
take him past the mill, and up to the prison ; all the village 
sees the prison gate open in the darkness of the night, and swallow 
him — like this ! ” 

He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a 
sounding snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to 
mar the effect by opening it again, Defarge said, “Go on, Jacques.” 

“ All the village,” pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and 
in a low voice, “withdraws; all the village whispers by the foun- 
tain ; all the village sleeps ; all the village dreams of that unhappy 
' one, within the locks and bars of the prison on the crag, and never 
to come out of it, except to perish. In the morning, with my tools 
upon my shoulder, eating my morsel of black bread as I go, I 
make a circuit by the prison, on my way to my work. There 
I see him, high up, behind the bars of a lofty iron cage, bloody 
and dusty as last night, looking through. He has no hand free, to 
wave to me ; I dare not call to him ; he regards me like a dead 
man.” 

Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks 
of all of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened 
to the countryman’s story; the manner of all of them, wliile it 

L 


146 


A tai^e of two cities. 

was secret, was authoritative too. They had the air of a rough 
tribunal ; Jacques One and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each 
with his chin resting on his hand, and his eyes intent on the road- 
mender ; Jacques Three, equally intent, on one knee behind them, 
with his agitated hand always gliding over the network of fine 
nerves about his mouth and nose ; Defarge standing between them 
and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the light of the window, 
by turns looking from him to them, and from them to him. 

“ Go on, Jacques,” said Defarge. 

“ He remains up there in his iron cage some days. The village 
looks at him by stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, 
from a distance, at the prison on the crag ; and in the evening, 
when the work of the day is achieved and it assembles to gossip at 
the fountain, all faces are turned towards the prison. Formerly, 
they were turned towards the posting-house ; now, they are turned 
towards the prison. They whisper at the fountain, that although 
condemned to death he will not be executed ; they say that peti- 
tions have been presented in Paris, showing that he was enraged 
and made mad by the death of his child ; they say that a petition 
has been presented to the King himself. What do I know ? It 
is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.” 

“ Listen then, Jacques,” Number One of that name sternly 
interposed. “ Know that a petition was presented to the King 
and Queen. All here, yourself excepted, saw the King take it, in 
his carriage in the street, sitting beside the Queen. It is Defarge 
whom you see here, who, at the hazard of his life, darted out before 
the horses, with the petition in his hand.” 

“And once again listen, Jacques!” said the kneeling Number 
Three ; his fingers ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, 
with a strikingly greedy air, as if he hungered for something — 
that was neither food nor drink ; “ the guard, horse and foot, sur- 
rounded the petitioner, and struck him blows. You hear?” 

“ I hear, messieurs.” 

“Go on then,” said Defarge. 

“ Again ; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,” re- 
sumed the countryman, “that he is brought down into our country 
to be executed on the. spot, and that he will very certainly be ex- 
ecuted. They even whisper that because he has slain Monseigneur, 
and because Monseigneur was the father of his tenants — serfs — 
what you will — he will be executed as a parricide. One old man 
says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will 
be burnt off before his face ; that, into wounds which will be made 
in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling 
oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur ; finally, that he will 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


147 


be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man says, 
all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on 
the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he 
lies ? I am not a scholar.” 

“Listen once again tlien, Jacques ! ” said the man with the restless 
hand and the craving air. “ The name of that prisoner was Dami- 
ens, and it was all done in open day, in the open streets of this city 
of Paris ; and nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that 
saw it done, than the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who 
were full of eager attention to the last — to the last, Jacques, pro- 
longed until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and an arm, and 
still breathed ! And it was done — why, how old are you ? ” 

“ Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty. 

“ It was done when you were more than ten years old ; you might 
have seen it.” 

“ Enough ! ” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “ Long live 
the Devil ! Go on.” 

“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak 
of nothing else ; even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. 
At length, on Sunday night when all the village is asleep, come 
soldiers, winding down from the prison, and their guns ring on the 
stones of the little street. Workmen dig, workmen hammer, sol- 
diers laugh and sing ; in the morning, by the fountain, there is 
raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water.” 

The mender of roads looked through rather than at the low 
ceiling, and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky. 

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows 
out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of 
drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and 
he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and 
in his mouth there is a gag — tied so, with a tight string, making 
him look almost as if he laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing 
his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his 
ears. “ On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, 
with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high — 
and is left hanging, poisoning the water.” 

They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his 
face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled 
the spectacle. 

“ It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children 
draw water I Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow ! 
Under it, have I said % When I left the village, Monday evening 
as- the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the 
shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the prison 


148 A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky 

rests upon it ! ” 

The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the 
other three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on 
him. 

“ That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned 
to do), and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met 
(as I was warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, 
now riding and now walking, through the rest of yesterday and 
through last night. And here you see me. ! ” 

After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, “ Good ! You 
have acted and recounted faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, 
outside the door ? ” 

“Very willingly,” said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge 
escorted to the top of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned. 

The three had risen, and their heads were together when he 
came back to the garret. 

“How say you, Jacques?” demanded Number One. “To be 
registered 1 ” 

“ To be registered, as doomed to destruction,” returned Defarge. 

“ Magnificent ! ” croaked the man with the craving. 

“ The chateau, and all the race ? ” inquired the first. 

“ The ch^eau and all the race,” returned Defarge. “ Extermi- 
nation.” 

The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, “ Magnificent ! ” 
and began gnawing another finger. 

“ Are you sure,” asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, “ that no em- 
barrassment can arise from our manner of keeping the register? 
Without doubt it is safe, for no one beyond ourselves can de- 
cipher it ; but shall we always be able to decipher it — or, I 
ought to say, will she?” 

“Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame 
my wife undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she 
would not lose a word of it — not a syllable of it. Knitted, in 
her own stitches and her own symbols, it will always be as plain 
to her as the sun. Confide in Madame Defarge. It would be 
easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase himself from 
existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the 
knitted register of Madame Defarge.” 

There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the 
man who hungered, asked : “ Is this rustic to be sent back soon ? 
I hope so. He is very simple ; is he not a little dangerous ? ” 

“ He knows nothing,” said Defarge ; “at least nothing more 
than would easily elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


149 


I charge mj^self with him ; let him remain with me ; I will take 
care of him, and set him on his road. He wishes to see the fine 
world — the King, the Queen, and Court ; let him see them on 
Sunday.” 

“ What ? ” exclaimed the hungry man, staring. “ Is it a good 
sign, that he wishes to see Royalty and Nobility?” 

“Jacques,” said Defarge ; “judiciously show a cat milk, if you 
wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, 
if you wish him to bring it down one day.” 

Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found 
already dozing on the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself 
down on the pallet-bed and take some rest. He needed no persua- 
sion, and was soon asleep. 

Worse quarters than Defarge’s vdne-shop, could easily have been 
found in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a 
mysterious dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, 
his life was very new and agreeable. But, madame sat all day at 
her counter, so expressly unconscious of him, and so particularly 
determined not to perceive that his being there had any connection 
with anything below the surface, that he shook in his wooden shoes 
whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he contended with himself 
that it was impossible to foresee what that lady might pretend 
next ; and he felt assured that if she should take it into her 
brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a 
murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go 
through with it until the play was played out. 

Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not en- 
chanted (though he said he was) to find that madame was to ac- 
company monsieur and himself to Versailles. It was additionally 
disconcerting to have madame knitting all the way there, in a 
public conveyance; it was additionally disconcerting yet, to have 
madame in the crowd in the afternoon, still with her knitting in 
lier hands as the crowd waited to see the carriage of the King and 
Queen. 

“You work hard, madame,” said a man near her. 

“Yes,” answered Madame Defarge; “I have a good deal to 
do.” 

“ What do you make, madame ? ” 

“ Many things.” 

“ For instance ” 

“For instance,” returned Madame Defarge, composedly, 
“shrouds.” 

The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and 
the mender of roads fanned himself with his blue cap : feeling it 


150 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


mightily close and oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen 
to restore him, he was fortunate in having his remedy at hand ; 
for, soon the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in 
their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their 
Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords ; 
and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly 
spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, 
the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary 
intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the 
Queen, Long live everybody and everything ! as if he had never 
heard of ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were gar- 
dens, courtyards, terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and 
Queen, more Bull’s Eye, more lords and ladies, more Long live they 
all ! until he absolutely wept with sentiment. During the whole 
of this scene, which lasted some three hours, he had plenty of 
shouting and weeping and sentimental company, and throughout 
Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him from flying 
at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to pieces. 

“ Bravo ! ” said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was 
over, like a patron ; “ you are a good boy ! ” 

The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mis- 
trustful of having made a mistake in his late demonstrations ; but 
no. 

“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you 
make these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are 
the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.” 

“Hey !” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that’s true.” 

“ These fools know” nothing. While they despise your breath, 
and would stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like 
you rather than in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know 
what your breath tells them. Let it deceive them, then, a little 
longer ; it cannot deceive them too much.” 

Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded 
in confirmation. 

“As to you,” said she, “you w^ould shout and shed tears for 
anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would vou 
not?” 

“ Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.” 

“ If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon 
them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your owui 
advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say ' 
Would you not?” 

“ Truly yes, madame.” 

“ Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


151 


and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your 
own advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers ; 
would you not ? ” 

“ It is true, madame.” 

“You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,” said Madame 
Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they 
had last been apparent ; “ now, go home ! ” 


CHAPTER XVI. 

STILL KNITTING. 

Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably 
to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled 
through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary 
miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point 
of the compass where the chMeau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in 
his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had 
the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, 
that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat 
and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the 
great stone courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon 
their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. 
A rumour just lived in the village — had a faint and bare existence 
there, as its people had — that when the knife struck home, the 
faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain ; also, 
that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the 
fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, 
which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over 
the great window of the bedchamber where the murder was done, 
two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which every- 
body recognised, and which nobody had seen of old ; and on the 
scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from 
the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a 
skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they 
all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate 
hares who could find a living there. 

Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on 
the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well — thousands 
of acres of land — a whole province of France — all France itself — 
lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. 
So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie 
in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a 


152 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer 
intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, 
every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible 
creature on it. 

The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the star- 
light, in their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their 
journey naturally tended. There was the usual stoppage at the 
barrier guard-house, and the usual lanterns came glancing forth for 
the usual examination and inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted ; 
knowing one or two of the soldiery there, and one of the police. 
The latter he was intimate with, and affectionately embraced. 

AVhen Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his 
dusky wings, and they, having finally alighted near the Saint’s 
boundaries, were picking their way on foot through the black mud 
and offal of his streets, Madame Defarge spoke to her husband : 

“ Say then, my friend ; what did Jacques of the police tell thee ? ” 

“ Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another sjDy 
commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all 
that he can say, but he knows of one.” 

“ Eh well ! ” said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a 
cool business air. “ It is necessary to register him. How do they 
call that man h ” 

“ He is English.” 

“ So much the better. His name 1 ” 

“Barsad,” said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. 
But, he had been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt 
it with perfect correctness. 

“ Barsad,” repeated madame. “ Good. Christian name ? ” 

“John.” 

“ John Barsad,” repeated madame, after murmuring it once to 
herself. “Good. His appearance ; is it known ? ” 

“ Age, about forty years ; height, about five feet nine ; black 
hair; complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes 
dark, face thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, 
having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, 
therefore, sinister.” 

“ Eh my faith. It is a portrait ! ” said madame, laughing. “ He 
shall be registered to-morrow.” 

They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was 
midnight), and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post 
at her desk, counted the small moneys that had been taken during 
her absence, examined the stock, went through the entries in the 
book, made other entries of her owii, checked the serving man in 
every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed. Then she 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


153 


turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the second time, 
and began knotting them up in her handkerchief, in a chain of sep- 
arate knots, for safe keeping through the night. All this while, 
Defarge, with his pipe in his mouth, walked up and down, compla- 
cently admiring, but never interfering ; in which condition, indeed, 
as to the business and his domestic affairs, he walked up and down 
through life. 

The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by 
so foul a neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge’s olfac- 
tory sense was by 'no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt 
much stronger than it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and 
brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the compound of scents away, as 
he put down his smoked-out pipe. 

“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she 
knotted the money. ' “ There are only the usual odours.” 

“ I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged. 

“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes 
had never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray 
or two for him. “ Oh, the men, the men ! ” 

“But my dear ! ” began Defarge. 

“ But my dear ! ” repeated madame, nodding firmly ; “ but my 
dear ! You are faint of heart to-night, my dear ! ” 

“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of 
his breast, “ it is a long time.” 

“ It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a 
long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time ; it is 
the rule.” 

“ It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” 
said Defarge. 

“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to 
make and store the lightning? Tell me.” 

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something 
in that too. 

“ It does not take a long time,” said madame, “ for an earth- 
quake to swallow a town. Eh well ! Tell me how long it takes to 
prepare the earthquake ? ” 

“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge. 

“ But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces every- 
thing before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though 
it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.” 

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe. 

“ I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for empha- 
sis, “ that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road 
and coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell 


154 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


thee it is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of 
all the world that we know, consider the faces of all the world that 
we know, consider the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie 
addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can 
such things last ? Bah ! I mock you.” 

“ My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with 
his head a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a 
docile and attentive pupil before his catechist, “ I ,do not question 
all this. But it has lasted a long time, and it is possible — you 
know well, my wife, it is possible — that it may not come, during 
our lives.” 

“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another 
knot, as if there were another enemy strangled. 

“ Well 1 ” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apolo- 
getic shrug. “We shall not see the triumph.” 

“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her ex- 
tended hand in strong action. “ Nothing that we do, is done in 
vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph. 
But even if not, even if I knew certainly not, show me the neck 
of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I would ” 

Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot 
indeed. 

“ Hold ! ” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged 
with cowardice ; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.” 

“Yes 1 But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see 
your victim and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain your- 
self without that. When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a 
devil ; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained 
— not shown — yet always ready.” 

Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by strik- 
ing her little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked 
its brains out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her 
arm in a serene manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed. 

Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in 
the wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, 
and if she now and then glanced at the flower, it was with no in- 
fraction of her usual preoccupied air. There were a few customers, 
drinking or not drinking, standing or seated, sprinkled about. 
The day was very hot, and heaps of flies, who were extending 
their inquisitive and adventurous perquisitions into all the gluti- 
nous little glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom. Their 
decease made no impression on the other flies out promenading, 
who looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they themselves 
were elephants, or something as far removed), until they met the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


155 


same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are ! — perhaps 
they thought as much at Court that sunny summer day. 

A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame 
Defarge which she felt to he a new one. She laid down her knit- 
ting, and began to pin her rose in her head-dress, before she looked 
at the figure. 

It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the 
rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop 
out of the wine-shop. 

“ Good day, madame,” said the new-comer. 

“ Good day, monsieur.” 

She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knit- 
ting : “ Hah ! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet 
nine, black hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, 
eyes dark, thin, long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, 
having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts 
a sinister expression ! 'Good day, one and all ! ” 

“ Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, 
and a mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.” 

Madame complied with a polite air. 

“ Marvellous cognac this, madame ! ” 

It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and 
Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. 
She said, however, J;hat the cognac was flattered, and took up her 
knitting. The visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and 
took the opportunity of observing the place in general. 

“You knit with great skill, madame.” 

“ I am accustomed to it.” 

“ A pretty pattern too ! ” 

“ You think so ? ” said madame, looking at him with a smile. 

“ Decidedly. May one ask what it is for ? ” 

“ Pastime,” said madame, still looking at him with a smilOj 
while her fingers moved nimbly. 

“ Not for use ? ” 

“ That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do 

well,” said madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a 
stern kind of coquetry, “ I’ll use it ! ” 

It was remarkable ; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to 
be decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame 
Defarge. Two men had entered separately, and had been about to 
order drink, when, catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, 
made a pretence of looking about as if for some friend who was 
not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been there 
when this visitor entered, was there one left. They had all 


156 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able 
to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a poverty-stricken, 
purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and unimpeachable. 

“ John,” thought inadame, checking off her work as her fingers 
knitted, and her eyes looked at the stranger. “ Stay long enough, 
and I shall knit ‘Bars ad ’ before you go.” 

“You have a husband, madame ? ” 

“ I have.” 

“ Children ? ” 

“ No children.” 

“ Business seems bad ? ” :■ 

“ Business is very bad ; the people are so poor.” 

“ Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people ! So oppressed, too — - 
as you say.” 

“ As you say,” madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knit- 
ting an extra something into his name that boded him no good. 

“ Pardon me ; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally 
think so. Of course.” 

“/ think?” returned madame, in a high voice. “I and my 
husband have enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without 
thinking. All we think, here, is how to live. That is the sub- 
ject we think of, and it gives us, from morning to night, enough 
to think about, without embarrassing our heads concerning others. 
/ think for others ? No, no.” 

The spy, who was there to pick up any -crumbs he could find or 
make, did not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister 
face ; but, stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his 
elbow on Madame Defarge’s little counter, and occasionally sipping 
his cognac. 

“ A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution. Ah ! 
the poor Gaspard ! ” With a sigh of great compassion. 

“My faith!” returned madame, coolly and lightly, “if people 
use knives for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew 
beforehand what the price of his luxury wa^; he has paid the 
price.” 

“ I believe,” said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that 
invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary suscep- 
tibility in every muscle of his wicked face; “I believe there is 
much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the 
poor fellow ? Between ourselves.” 

“ Is there? ” asked madame, vacantly. 

“ Is there not ? ” 

“ — Here is my husband ! ” said Madame Defarge. 

As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


157 


saluted him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging 
smile, “Good day, Jacques !” Defarge stopped short, and stared 
at him. 

“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so 
much confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare. 

“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the 
wine-shop. “You mistake me for another. That is not my name. 
I am Ernest Defarge.” 

“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too : 

“ good day ! ” 

“ Good day ! ” answered Defarge, drily. 

“ I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of 
chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is — and no 
wonder ! — much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching 
the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.” 

“ No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I 
know nothing of it.” 

Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood 
with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that 
barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom 
either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction. 

The spy, well used to his business, did not change his uncon- 
scious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of 
fresh water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame 
Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting again, and 
hummed a little song over it. 

“ You seem to know this quarter well ; that is to say, better 
than I do ? ” observed Defarge. 

“ Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly 
interested in its miserable inhabitants.” 

“ Hah I ” muttered Defarge. 

“ The pleasure of conversing with you. Monsieur Defarge, recalls 
to me,” pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing 
some interesting associations with your name.” 

“Indeed !” said Defarge, with much indifference. 

“ Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old 
domestic, had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. 
You see I am informed of the circumstances ? ” 

“ Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it 
conveyed to him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she 
knitted and warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always 
with brevity. 

“ It was to you,” said the spy, “ that his daughter came ; and it 
was from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a 


158 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


neat brown monsieur ; how is he called ? — in a little wig — 
Lorry — of the bank of Tellson and Company — over to England.” 

“ Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge. 

“ Very interesting remembrances ! ” said the spy. “ I have 
known Doctor Manette and his daughter, in England.” 

“ Yes ? ” said Defarge. 

“You don’t hear much about them now?” said the spy. 

“ No,” said Defarge. 

“ In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and 
her little song, “we never hear about them. We received the 
news of their safe arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps 
two ; but, since then, they have gradually taken their road in life 
— we, ours — and we have held no correspondence.” 

“ Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be 
married.” 

“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have 
been married long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.” 

“ Oh ! You know I am English.” 

“ I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame ; “ and what the 
tongue is, I suppose the man is.” 

He did not take the identification as a compliment ; but he 
made the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping 
his cognac to the end, he added : 

“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an 
Englishman ; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And 
speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard ! It was cruel, cruel !), 
it is a curious thing that she is going to marry the nephew of 
Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that 
height of so many feet ; in other words, the present Marquis. 
But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there ; 
he is Mr. Charles Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s 
family.” 

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a 
palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the 
little counter, as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his 
pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The 
spy would have been no spy if he had failed to see it, or to record 
it in his mind. 

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove 
to be worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, 
Mr. Barsad paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave : tak- 
ing occasion to say, in a genteel manner, before he departed, that 
he looked forward to the pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame 
Defarge again. For some minutes after he had emerged into the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


159 


outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained 
exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back. 

“ Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at 
his wife as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her 
chair : “ what he has said of Ma’amselle Manette ? ” 

“ As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a 
little, “ it is probably false. But it may be true.” 

“ If it is ” Defarge began, and stopped. 

“ If it is ? ” repeated his wife. 

“ — And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph — 
I hope, for her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of 
France.” 

“ Her husband’s destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual 
composure, “ will take him where he is to go, and will lead him 
to the end that is to end him. That is all I know.” 

“ But it is very strange — now, at least, is it not very strange ” 

— said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to 
admit it, “ that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, 
and herself, her husband’s name should be proscribed under your 
hand at this moment, by the side of that infernal dog’s who has 
just left us ? ” 

“Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,” 
answered madame. “ I have them both here, of a certainty ; and 
they are both here for their merits ; that is enough.” 

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and 
presently took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound 
about her head. Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense 
that the objectionable decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was 
on the watch for its disappearance ; howbeit, the Saint took cour- 
age to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop re- 
covered its habitual aspect. 

In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine 
turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, 
and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of 
air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed 
to pass from place to place and from group to group : a Missionary 

— there were many like her — such as the world will do "well 
never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted 
worthless things ; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical 
substitute for eating and drinking ; the hands moved for the jaws 
and the digestive apparatus : if the bony fingers had been still, the 
stomachs would have been more famine-pinched. 

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And 
as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went 


160 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had 
spoken with, ana left behind. 

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admira- 
tion. “A great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand 
woman, a frightfully grand woman ! ” 

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church 
bells and the distant beating of the military dl'ums in the Palace 
Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting.. Darkness encom- 
passed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the 
church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over 
France, should be melted into thundering cannon ; when the mili- 
tary drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night 
all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life. So 
much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, 
that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet 
unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping 
heads. 


CHAPTER XVII. 

ONE NIGHT. 

Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet 
corner in Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and 
his daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did the 
moon rise with a milder radiance over great London, than on that 
night when it found them still seated under the tree, and shone 
upon their faces through its leaves. 

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last 
evening for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree. 

“You are happy, my dear father?” 

“ Quite, my child.” 

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. 
When it was yet light enough to work alid read, she had neither 
engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She 
had employed herself in both ways, at his side under the^tree’ many 
and many a time ; but, this time was not quite like any*other, and 
nothing could make it so. 

“And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply 
happy in the love that Heaven has so blessed — my love for 
Charles, and Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were not to 
be still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as 
that it would part us, even by the length of a few of these streets. 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


161 


I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can tell 
you. Even as it is ” 

Even as it was, she could not command her voice. 

In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her 
face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as 
the light of the sun itself is — as the light called human life is — 
at its coming and its going. 

“Dearest dear ! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel 
quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of 
mine, will ever interpose between us ? / know it well, but do you 

know it ? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain ? ” 

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he 
could scarcely have assumed, “ Quite sure, my darling ! More than 
that,” he added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far 
brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have 
been — nay, than it ever was — without it.” 

“ If I could hope that, my father ! ” 

“ Believe it, love ! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and 
how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and 
young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life 
should not be wasted ” 

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and 
repeated the word. 

‘‘ — wasted, my child — should not be wasted, struck aside from 
the natural order of things — for my sake. Your unselfishness 
cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this ; 
but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while 
yours was incomplete 1 ” 

“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been 
quite happy with you.” 

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have 
been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied : 

“ My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not 
been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no 
other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my 
life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have 
fallen on you.” 

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him 
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new 
sensation while his wmrds were in her ears ; and she remembered 
it long afterwards. -i'r 

“ See ! ” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards 
the moon. “ I have looked at her from my prison- window, when 
I could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been 

M 


162 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, 
that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have 
looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought 
of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across 
her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which 
I could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering 
manner, as he looked at the moon, “ It was twenty either way, I 
remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.” 

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that 
time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to 
shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to con- 
trast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance 
that was over. 

“ I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the 
unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. 
Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had 
killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge 
his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my de- 
sire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who 
would never know his father’s story ; who might even live to weigh 
the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will 
and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a 
woman.” 

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand. 

“ I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful 
of me — rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. 
I have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen 
her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have alto- 
gether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the 
next generation my place was* a blank.” 

“ My father ! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a 
daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been 
that child.” 

“ You, Lucie ? It is out of the consolation and restoration you 
have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass be- 
tween us and the moon on this last night. — What did I sav iust 
now ? ” 

“ She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.” 

“ So ! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and 
the silence have touched me in a different way — have affected me 
with something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion 
that had pain for its foundations could — I have imagined her as 
coming to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom be- 
yond the fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


163 


as I now see you ; except that I never held her in my arms ; it 
stood between the little grated window and the door. But, you 
understand that that was not the child I am speaking of ? ’’ 

“ The figure was not ; the — the — image ; the fancy ? ” 

“ ISTo. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed 
sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind 
pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward appear- 
ance I know no more than that she was like her mother. The 
other had that likeness too — as you have — but was not the same. 
Can you follow me, Lucie ? Hardly, I think ? I doubt you must 
have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinc- 
tions.” 

His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from 
running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition. 

“ In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moon- 
light, coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home 
of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost 
father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her 
life was active, cheerful, useful ; but my poor history pervaded it all.” 

“ I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in my 
love that was I.” 

“ And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, 
“and they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. 
When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far from its 
frowning Walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. 
She could never deliver me ; I imagined that she always brought 
me back after showing me such things. But then, blessed with 
the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and blessed her.” 

“I am that child, I hope, my father. 0 my dear, my dear, 
will you bless me as fervently to-morrow ? ” 

“ Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to- 
night for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking Cod 
for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, 
never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and 
that we have before us.” 

He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and hum- 
bly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, 
they went into the house. 

There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry ; there 
was even to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The 
marriage was to make no change in their place of residence ; they 
had been able to extend it, by taking to themselves the upper 
rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and 
they desired nothing more. 


164 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES 


Doctor Manette was s^ery cheerful at the little supper. They 
were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He re- 
gretted that Charles was not there ; was more than half disposed 
to object to the loving little plot that kept him away ; and drank 
to him affectionately. ^ 

So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they 
separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of tlie morning, 
Lucie came down-stairs again, and stole into his room ; not free 
from unshaped fears, beforehand. 

All things, however, were in their places ; all was quiet ; and 
he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, 
and his hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless 
candle in the shadow at a distancej crept up to his bed, and put 
her lips to his ; then, leaned over him, and looked at him. 

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn ; 
but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, 
that he held th^ mastery of them even in his sleep. A more re- 
markable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an 
unseen assailant, was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of 
sleep, that night. 

. She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer 
that she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, 
and as his sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and 
kissed his lips once more, and went away. So, the sunrise came, 
and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree moved upon his 
face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

NINE DAYS. 

The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready 
outside the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where he was speak- 
ing with Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to church ; the 
beautiful bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross — to whom the event, 
through a gradual process of reconcilement to the inevitable, would 
have been one of absolute bliss, but for the yet lingering considera- 
tion that her brother Solomon should have been the bridegroom. 

“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire 
the bride, and who had been moving round her to take in every 
point of her quiet, pretty dress ; “ and so it was for this, my sweet 
Lucie, that I brought you across the Channel, such a baby 1 Lord 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


165 


bless me! How little I thought what I was doing! How 
lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring on my friend 
Mr. Charles ! ” 

You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, 
“ and therefore how could you know it ? Nonsense ! ” 

“ Really ? Well ; but don’t cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry. 

“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; you are.” 

“I, my Pross ? ” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant 
with her, on occasion.) 

“ You were, just now ; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it. 
Such a present of plate as you have made ’em, is • enough to bring 
tears into anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon in the 
collection,” said Miss Pross, “ that I didn’t cry over, last night after 
the box came, till I couldn’t see it.” 

“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my 
honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of 
remembrance invisible to any one. Dear me ! This is an occasion 
that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear ! 
To think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time 
these fifty -years almost ! ” 

. “Not at all ! ” From Miss Pross. 

“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorr^ % ” asked 
the gentleman of that name. 

“ Pooh ! ” rejoined Miss Pross ; “ you were a bachelor in your 
cradle.” 

“ Well ! ” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, 
“that seems probable, too.” 

“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross, 
“ before you were put in your cradle.” 

“ Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “ that I was very unhandsomely 
dealt with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of 
my pattern. Enough ! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm 
soothingly round her waist, “ I hear them moving in the next room, 
and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious 
not to lose the final opportunity of saying something to you that 
you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in hands 
as earnest and as loving as your own ; he shall be taken every 
conceivable care of; during the next fortnight, while you are in 
Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s shall go to the wall 
(comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight’s 
end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on your other 
fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him to 
you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear 
Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl 


16G A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to 
claim his own.” 

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the 
well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the 
bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine 
tenderness and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were 
as old as Adam. 

The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with 
Charles Darnay. He was so deadly pale — which had not been 
the case when they went in together — that no vestige of colour 
was to be seen in his face. But, in the composure of his manner 
he was unaltered, except that to the shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry it 
disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air of avoidance and 
dread had lately passed over him, like a cold wind. 

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the 
chariot which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest 
followed in another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, 
where no strange eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette 
were happily married. 

Besides 'the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the 
little group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and 
sparkling* glanced on the bride’s hand, which were newly released 
from the dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry’s pockets. They 
returned home to breakfast, and all went well, and in due course 
the golden hair that had mingled with the poor shoemaker’s white 
locks in the Paris garret, were mingled with them again in the 
morning sunlight, on the threshold of the door at parting. 

It was a. hard parting, though it was not for long. But her 
father cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from 
her enfolding arms, “ Take her, Charles ! She is yours ! ” 

And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and 
she was gone. 

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the 
preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. 
Lorry, and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they 
turned into the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr-. Lorry 
observed a great change to have come over the Doctor ; as if the 
golden arm uplifted there, had struck him a poisoned blow. 

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have 
been expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. 
But, it was the old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry ; and 
through his absent manner of clasping his head and drearily wan- 
dering away into his own room when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry 
was reminded of Defarge the wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


167 


“ I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious considera- 
tion, “ I think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all 
disturb him. I must look in at Tellson’s ; so I will go there at 
once and come back presently. Then, we will take him a ride into 
the country, and dine there, and all will be well.” 

It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson’s, than to look 
out of Tellson’s. He was detained two hours. When he came back, 
he ascended the old staircase alone, having asked no q^uestion of the 
servant ; going thus into the Doctor’s rooms, he was stopped by a 
low sound of knocking. 

“Good God ! ” he said, with a start. “What’s that ? ” 

Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. “ 0 me, 0 me ! 
All is lost ! ” cried she, wringing her hands. “ What is to be told 
to Ladybird ? He doesn’t know me, and is making shoes ! ” 

Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into 
the Doctor’s room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it 
had been when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and 
his head was bent down, and he was very busy. 

“ Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette ! ” 

The Doctor looked at him for a moment — half inquiringly, half 
as if he were angry at being spoken to — and bent over his work 
again. 

He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat ; his shirt was open at 
the throat, as it used to be when he did that work ; and even the 
old haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He 
worked hard — impatiently — as if in some sense of having been 
interrupted. 

Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it 
was a shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that 
was lying by him, and asked what it was ? 

“A young lady’s walking shoe,” he muttered, without looking 
up. “ It ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be.” 

“ But, Doctor Manette. Look at me ! ” 

He obeyed, in the. old mechanically submissive manner, without 
pausing in his work. 

“You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not 
your proper occupation. Think, dear friend ! ” 

Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an 
instant at a time, when he was requested to do so ; but, no persua- 
sion would extract a word from him. He worked, and worked, 
and worked, in silence, and words fell on him as they would have 
fallen on an echoless wall, or on the air. The only ray of hope 
that Mr. Lorry could discover, was, that he sometimes furtively 
looked up without being asked. In that, there seemed a faint 


168 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


expression of curiosity or perplexity — as though he were trying to 
reconcile some doubts in his mind. 

Two things at once impressed themselves^ on Mr. Lorry, as im- 
portant above all others ; the first, that this must be kept secret 
from Lucie ; the second, that it must be Icept secret from all who 
knew him. In conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate 
steps towards the latter precaution, by giving out that the Doctor 
was not well, and required a few days of complete rest. In aid of 
the kind deception to be practised on his daughter. Miss Pross was 
to write, describing his having been called away professionally, and 
referring to an imaginary letter of two or three hurried lines in his 
own hand, represented to have been addressed to her by the same 
post. 

These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry 
took in the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen 
soon, he kept another course in reserve; which was, to have a 
certain opinion that he thought the best, on the Doctor’s case. 

In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course 
being there% rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch 
him attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. 
He therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson’s 
for the first time in his life, and took his post by the window in 
the same room. 

He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless 
to speak to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He 
abandoned that attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to 
keep himself always before him, as a silent protest against the 
delusion into which he had fallen, or was falling. He remained, 
therefore, in his seat near the window, reading and writing, and 
expressing in as many pleasant and natural ways as he could think 
of, that it was a free place. 

Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and 
worked on, that first day, until it was too dark to see — worked 
on, half an hour after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, 
to read or write. When he put his tools aside as useless, until 
morning, Mr. Lorry rose and said to him : 

“ Will you go out ? ” 

He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old 
manner, looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low 
voice : 

“Out?” 

“ Yes ; for a walk with me. Why not ? ” 

He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. 
But, Mr. Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


169 


in the dusk, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, 
that he was in some misty way asking himself, “Why not?” The 
sagacity of the man of business perceived an advantage here, and 
determined to hold it. 

Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and ob- 
served him at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up 
and down for a long time before he lay down ; but, when he did 
finally lay himself down, he fell asleep. In the morning, he was 
up betimes, and went straight to his bench and to work. 

On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his 
name, and spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to 
them. He returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard 
what was said, and that he thought about it, however confusedly. 
This encouraged Mr. Lorry to have Miss Pross in with her work, 
several times during the day ; at those times, they quietly spoke 
of Lucie, and of her father then present, precisely in the usual 
manner, and as if there were nothing amiss. This was done with- 
out any demonstrative accompaniment, not long enough, or often 
enough to harass him ; and it lightened Mr. Lorry’s friendly heart 
to believe that lie looked up oftener, and that he appeared to be 
stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding him. 

When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before : 

“Dear Doctor, will you go out?” 

As before, he repeated, “ Out ? ” 

“ Yes ; for a walk with me. Why not ? ” 

This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no 
answer from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. 
In the meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the win- 
dow, and had sat there looking down at the plane-tree ; but, on 
Mr. Lorry’s return, he slipped away to his bench. 

The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry’s hope darkened, 
and his heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier 
every day. The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. 
Five days, six days, seven days, eight days, nine days. 

With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing 
heavier and heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. 
The secret was well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy ; 
but he could not fail to observe that the shoemaker, whose hand 
had been a little out at first, was growing dreadfully skilful, and 
that he had never been so intent on his work, and that his hands 
had never been so nimble and expert, as in the dusk of the ninth 
evening. 


170 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

AN OPINION. 

Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his 
post. On the tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by 
the shining of the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had 
overtaken him when it was dark night. 

He rubbed his eyes and roused himself ; but he doubted, when 
he had done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to 
the door of the Doctor’s room and looking in, he perceived that 
the shoemaker’s bench and tools were put aside again, and that the 
Doctor himself sat reading at the window. He was in his usual 
morning dress, and his face (which Mr. Lorry could distinctly 
see), though still very pale, was calmly studious and attentive. 

Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. 
Lorry felt giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the 
late shoemaking might not be a disturbed dream of his own ; for, 
did not his eyes show him his friend before him in his accustomed 
clothing and aspect, and employed as usual ; and was there any 
sign within their range, that the change of which he had so strong 
an impression had actually happened ? 

It was but the inquiry of his first confusion ^ and astonishment, 
the answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced 
by a real corresponding and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis 
Lorry, there ? How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, 
on the sofa in Doctor Manette’s consulting-room, and to be debat- 
ing these points outside the Doctor’s bedroom door in the early 
morning ? 

Within a few minutes. Miss Press stood whispering at his side. 
If he had had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity 
have resolved it ; but he was by that time clear-headed, and had 
none. He advised that they should let the time go by until the 
regular breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if noth- 
ing unusual had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary 
state of mind, Mr. Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek 
direction and guidance from the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, 
so anxious to obtain. 

Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme 
was worked out with care. Having abundance of time for his 
usual methodical toilette, Mr. Lorry presented himself at ' the 
breakfast-hour in his usual white linen, and with his usual neat 
leg. The Doctor was summoned in the usual way, and came to 
breakfast. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


171 


So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstep- 
ping those delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt 
to be the only safe advance, he at first supposed that his daughter’s 
marriage had taken place yesterday. An incidental allusion, pur- 
posely thrown out, to the day of the week, and the day of the 
month, set him thinking and counting, and evidently made him 
uneasy. In all other respects, however, he was so composedly 
himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid he sought. 
And that aid was his own. 

Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and 
he and the Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly : 

“ My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in con- 
fidence, on a very curious case in which I am deeply interested ; 
that is to say, it is very curious to me ; perhaps, to your better 
information it may be less so.” 

Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, 
the Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had 
already glanced at his hands more than once. 

“ Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately 
on the arm,. “ the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of 
mine. Pray give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake 
— and above all, for his daughter’s — his daughter’s, my dear 
Manette.” 

“If I understand,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, “some 
mental shock ? ” 

“Yes!” 

“ Be explicit,” said the Doctor. “ Spare no detail.” 

Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded. 

“My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged 
shock, of great acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings, 
the — the — as you express it — the mind. The mind. It is the 
case of a shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one can- 
not say for how long, because I believe he cannot calculate the time 
himself, and there are no other means of getting at it. It is the 
case of a shock from which the sufferer recovered, by a process 
that li^e cannot trace himself — as I once heard him publicly relate 
in a striking manner. It is the case of a shock from which he has 
recovered, so completely, as to be a highly intelligent man, capa- 
ble of close application of mind, and great exertion of body, and 
' of constantly making fresh additions to his stock of knowledge, 
which was already very large. But, unfortunately, there has 
been,” he paused and took a deep breath — “a slight relapse.” 

The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, “ Of how long duration ? ” 

“Nine-days and nights.” 


172 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ How did it show itself? I infer,” glancing at .his hands again, 
in the resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock ? ” 

“ That is the fact.” 

“Now, did you ever see him,” asked the Doctor, distinctly and 
collectedly, though in the same low voice, “ engaged in that pursuit 
originally ? ” 

“ Once.” 

“ And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects — 
or in all respects — as he was then ? ” 

“ I think in all respects.” 

“You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the 
relapse ? ” 

“No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be 
kept from her. It is known only to myself, and to one other who 
may be trusted.” 

The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, “ That was very 
kind. That was very thoughtful ! ” Mr. Lorry grasped his hand 
in return, and neither of the two spoke for a little while. 

“Now, my dear Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his 
most considerate and most alfectionate way, “ I am a mere man of 
business, and unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. 
I do not possess the kind of information necessary ; I do not pos- 
sess the kind of intelligence ; I want guiding.' There is no man 
in this world on whom I could so rely for right guidance, as on you. 
Tell me, how does this relapse come about ? Is there danger of 
another ? Could a repetition of it be prevented ? How should a 
repetition of it be treated? How does it come about at all? 
What can I do for my friend? No man ever can have been more 

desirous in his heart to serve a friend, than I am to serve mine, 

if I knew how. But I don’t know how to originate, in such a case. 
If your sagacity, knowledge, and experience, could put me on the 
right track, I might be able to do so much ; unenlightened and 

undirected, I can do so little. Pray discuss it with me; pray 

enable me to see it a little more clearly, and teach me how to be a 
little more useful.” 

Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were 
spoken, and Mr. Lorry did not press him. 

“ I think it probable,” said the Doctor, breaking silence with 
an effort, “that the’ relapse you have described, my dear friend, 
was not quite unforeseen by its subject.” 

“Was it dreaded by him?” Mr. Lorry ventured to ask. 

“Very much.” He said it with an involuntary shudder. 

“You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the 
sufferer’s mind, and how difficult — how almost impossible — it is. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 173 

for him to force himself to utter a word upon the topic that op- 
presses him.” 

“Would he,” asked Mr. Lorry, “be sensibly relieved if he could 
prevail upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, 
when it is on him 1 ” 

“ I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. 

I even believe it — in some cases — to be quite impossible.” 

“Now,” said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor’s 
arm again, after a short silence on both sides, “ to what would you 
refer this attack ? ” 

“I believe,” returned Doctor Manette, “that there had been a 
strong and extraordinary revival of the train of thought and 
remembrance that was the first cause of the malady. Some in- 
tense associations of a most distressing nature were vividly recalled, 

I think. It is probable that there had long been a dread lurking 
in his mind, that those associations would be recalled — say, under 
certain circumstances — say, on a particular occasion. He tried 
to prepare himself in vain ; perhaps the effort to prepare himself 
made him less able to bear it.” 

“ Would he remember w^hat took place in the relapse?” asked 
Mr. Lorry, with natural hesitation. 

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, 
and answered, in a low voice, “Not at all.” 

“Now, as to the future,” hinted Mr. Lorry. 

“As to the future,” said the Doctor, recovering firmness, “I . 
should have great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to 
restore him so soon, I should have great hope. He, yielding 
under the pressure of a complicated something, long dreaded and 
long vaguely foreseen and contended against, and recovering after 
the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that the worst was 
over.” 

“ Well, well ! That’s good comfort. I am thankful ! ” said Mr. 
Lorry. 

“ I am thankful ! ” repeated the Doctor, bending his head with 
reverence. 

“There are two other points,” said Mr. Lorry, “on which I am 
anxious to be instructed. I may go on ? ” 

“ You cannot do your friend a better service.” The Doctor gave 
him his hand. 

“ To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually 
energetic ; he applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition 
of professional knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to 
many things. Now, does he do too much ?” 

“I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be 


174 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


always in singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, nat- 
ural to it ; in part, the result of affliction. The less it was occu- 
pied with healthy things, the more it would be in danger of turning 
in the unhealthy direction. He may hare observed himself, and 
made the discovery.” 

“ You are sure that lie is not under too great a strain ? ” 

“ I think I am quite sure of it.” 

“My dear Manette, if he were overworked now ” 

“ My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily ^e. There has 
been a violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.” 

“ Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a 
moment, that he was overworked; it would show itself in some 
renewal of this disorder ? ” 

“I do not think so. I do not think,” said Doctor Manette with 
the firmness of self-conviction, “ that anything but the one train of 
association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but 
some extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After 
what has happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to 
imagine any such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, 
and I almost believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are 
exhausted.” 

He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a 
thing would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet 
with the confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance 
out of personal endurance and distress. It was not for his friend 
to abate that confidence. He professed himself more relieved and 
encouraged than he really was, and approached his second and last 
point. He felt it to be the most difficult of all ; but, remembering 
his old Sunday morning conversation with Miss Pross, and remem- 
bering what he had seen in the last nine days, he knew that he 
must face it. 

“The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing 
affliction so happily recovered from,” said Mr. Lorry, clearing his 
throat, “we will call — Blacksmith’s work. Blacksmith’s work. 
We will say, to put a case and for the sake of illustration, that he 
had been used, in his bad time, to work at a little forge. We will 
say that he was unexpectedly found at his forge again. Is it not 
a pity that he should keep it by him ? ” 

The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot 
nervously on the ground. ■ ■ , ■ 

“He has always kept it by him,”- said Mr. Lorry, with an anx- 
ious look at his friend. “ Now, would it not be better that he 
should let it go ? ” 

Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on 
the ground. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


175 




“ You do not find it easy to advise me ? ” said Mr. Lorry. “ I 

quite understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think ” 

And there.he shook his head, and stopped. 

“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy 
pause, “it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost 
workings of this poor man’s mind. He once yearned so frightfully 
for that occupation, and it was so welcome when it came ; no doubt 
it relieved his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the 
fingers for the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he 
became more practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenu- 
ity of the mental torture ; that he has never been able to bear the 
thought of putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when I 
- believe he is more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and 
even speaks of himself with a kind of confidence, the idea that he 
might need that old employment, and not find it, gives him a 
Tj sudden sense of terror, like that wLich one may fancy strikes to 
the heart of a lost child.” 

He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr. 
Lorry’s face. 

“ But may not — mind ! I ask for information, as a plodding 
man of business who only deals with such material objects as 
guineas, shillings, and bank-notes — may not the retention of the 
thing involve the retention of the idea ? If the thing were gone, 
my dear Manette, might not the fear go with it ? In short, is it 
not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the forge 1 ” 

There was another silence. 

“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old 
companion.” 

“ I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head ; for 
he gained in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “ I would 
recommend him to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I 
am sure it does no good. Come ! Give me your authority, like a 
dear good man. For his daughter’s sake, my dear Manette ! ” 

Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him ! 

“ In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would 
not take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when 
he is not there ; let him miss his old companion after an absence.” 

Mr. Loriy readily engaged for that, and the conference was 
ended. They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was 
quite restored. On the three following days he remained perfectly 
well, and on the fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and her 
husband. The precaution that had been taken to account for his 
silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had 
written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions. 


4 


/ 


176 


A TALE OF TWO CTITES. 


On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry 
went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, 
attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, 
and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoe- 
maker’s bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she 
were assisting at a murder — for which, indeed, in her grimness, 
she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously 
reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was commenced with- 
out delay in the kitchen fire ; and the tools, shoes, and leather, 
were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy 
appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while 
engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its 
traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible 
crime. / 


CHAPTER XX. 

A PLEA. 

When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who 
appeared, to offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They 
had not been at home many hours, when he presented himself. 
He was not improved in habits, or in looks, or in manner ; but 
there was a certain rugged air of fidelity about him, which was new 
to the observation of Charles Darnay. 

He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a win- 
dow, and of speaking to him when no one overheard. 

“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish ’we might be friends.” 

“We are already friends, I hope.” 

“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech ; but, 
I don’t mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish 
we might be friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either.” 

Charles Darnay — as was natural — asked him, in all good- 
humour and good-fellowship, what he did mean 1 

“ Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “ I find that easier to 
comprehend in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, 
let me try. You remember a certain famous occasion when I was 
more drunk than — than usual ? ” 

“ I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to 
confess that you had been drinking.” 

“ I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy 
upon me, for I always remember them. I hope it may be taken 
into account one day, when all days are at an end for me ! Don’t 
be alarmed ; I am not going to preach.” 



N 


THE ACCOMPLICES. 







178 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ I ain not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but 
alarming to me.” 

“Ah ! ” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he 
waved that away. “ On the drunken occasion in question (one of 
a large number, as you know), I was insufferable about liking you, 
and not liking you. I wish you would forget it.” 

“ I forgot it long ago.” 

“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Damay, oblivion is not 
so easy to me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no 
means forgotten it, and a light answer does not help me to forget 
it.” 

“ If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “ I beg your for- 
giveness for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, 
which, to my surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I 
declare to you, on the faith of a gentleman, that I have long dis- 
missed it from my mind. Good Heaven, what was there to dis- 
miss I Have I had nothing more important to remember, in the 
great service you rendered me that day ? ” 

“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow 
to you, when you speak of it in that way, that it was mere pro- 
fessional claptrap, I don’t know that I cared what became of you, 
when I rendered it. — Mind 1 I say when I rendered it ; I am 
speaking of the past.” 

“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I 
will not quarrel with your light answer.” 

“ Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me 1 I have gone aside from 
my purpose ; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you 
know me ; you know I am incapable of all the higher and better 
flights of men. If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he’ll tell you 
so.” 

“ I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.” 

“ Well 1 At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has 
never done any good, and never will.” 

“ I don’t know that you ‘never will.’ ” 

“ But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well ! If you 
could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of .such 
indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask 
that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person 
here; that I might 'be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if 
it were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me, 
an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for. its old service, and 
taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is 
a hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. 
It would satisfy me, I dare say, to know that I had it.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


179 


“ Will you try ? ” 

“ That is another way of saying that I am placed on the foot- 
ing I have indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that 
freedom with your name ? ” 

“I think so, Carton, by this time.” 

They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within 
a minute afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsub- 
stantial as ever. 

\ When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with 
Miss Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some 
mention of this conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney 
Carton as a problem of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of 
him, in short, not bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but 
as anybody might who saw him as he showed himself. 

He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair 
young wife ; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own 
rooms, he found her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of 
the forehead strongly marked. 

“We are thoughtful to-night ! ” said Darnay, drawing his arm 
about her. 

“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the 
inquiring and attentive expression fixed upon him ; “ we are rather 
thoughtful to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night.”' 

“ What is it, my Lucie ? ” 

“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg 
you not to ask it ? ” 

“ Will I promise ? What will I not promise to my Love?” 

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from 
the cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him ! 

“ I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration 
and respect than you expressed for him to-night.” 

“ Indeed, my own ? • Why so ? ” 

“ That is what you are not to ask me. But I think — I know 
— he does.” 

“ If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, 
my Life ? ” 

“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, 
and very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you 
to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and 
that there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleed- 
ing.” 

“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite 
astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never 
thought this of him.” , 


180 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed ; there 
is scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is 
reparable now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, 
gentle things, even magnanimous things.'” 

She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost 
man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for 
hours. 

“ And, 0 my dearest Love ! ” she urged, clinging nearer to him, 
laying her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, “ re- 
member how strong we are in our happiness, and how w^eak he is 
in his misery ! ” 

The supplication touched him home. “ I will always remember 
it, dear Heart ! I will remember it as long as I live.” 

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and 
folded her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the 
dark streets, could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could 
have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the 
soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to 
the night — and the words would not have parted from his lips for 
the first time — 

“ God bless her for her sweet compassion 1 ” 


CHAPTER XXL 

ECHOING FOOTSTEPS. 

A WONDERFUL comer for echoes, it has been remarked, that cor- 
ner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread 
which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old 
directress and 'companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the 
still house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echo- 
ing footsteps of years. 

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy 
young wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and 
her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in 
the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that 
stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts — hopes, 
of a love as yet unknown to her : doubts, of her remaining upon 
earth, to enjoy that new delight — divided her breast. Among the 
echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own 
early grave ; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so des- 
olate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her eyes, 
and broke like waves. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


181 


That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, 
among the advancing echoes, there wfis the tread of her tiny feet 
and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound 
as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always 
hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny 
with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom 
in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in 
his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her. 

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all to- 
gether, weaving the service of her happy influence through the 
tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie 
heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. 
Her husband’s step was strong and prosperous among them ; her 
father’s firm and equal. Lo, Miss Press, in harness of string, awak- 
ening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and 
pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden ! 

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they 
were not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, 
lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and 
he said, with a radiant smile, “ Dear papa and mamma, I am very 
sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister ; but I am 
called, and I must go ! ” those were not tears all of agony that 
wetted his young mother’s cheek, as the spirit departed from her 
embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid 
them not. They see my Father’s face. 0 Father, blessed words ! 

Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the 
other echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them 
that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little 
garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible 
to Lucie, in a hushed murmur — like the breathing of a summer 
sea asleep upon a* sandy shore — as the little Lucie, comically studi- 
ous at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s 
footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were 
blended in her life. 

The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Car- 
ton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privi- 
lege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them through the 
evening, as he had once done often. He never came there heated 
with wine. And one other thing regarding him was whispered in 
the echoes, which has been whispered by all true echoes for ages 
and ages. 

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with 
a blameless tliough an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a 
mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him — an 


182 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


instinctive delicacy of pity for him. AVhat fine hidden sensibilities 
are touched in such a case, no, echoes tell ; but it is so, and it was 
so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held 
out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. 
The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “ Poor Car- 
ton ! Kiss him for me ! ” 

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great 
engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful 
friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so 
favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, 
Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom, 
unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any stimulating 
sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead ; and 
he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion’s jackal, 
than any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a 
lion. Stryver was rich ; had married a florid widow with property 
and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them 
but the straight hair of their dumpling heads. 

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage 
of the most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before 
him like three sheep to the quiet corner in - Soho, and had offered 
as pupils to Lucie’s husband : delicately saying “ Halloa ! here 
are three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial pic- 
nic, Darnay ! ” The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread- 
and-cheese had quite bloated Mi. Stryver with indignation, which 
he afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentle- 
men, by directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars, like that 
tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, 
over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in 
practice to “ catch ” him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in 
himself, madam, which had rendered him “ not to be caught.” Some 
of his King’s Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties to the 
full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying 
that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself — which 
is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad 
offence, as to justify any such offender’s being carried off to some 
suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way. 

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pen- 
sive, sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, 
until her little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart 
the echoes of her child’s tread came, and those of her own dear 
father’s, always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear hus- 
band’s, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united 
liome, directed by herself with such a wise and elegant thrift that it 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


183 


was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how 
there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times 
her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him mar- 
ried (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her hus- 
band had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her 
love for him or her help to him, and asked her “ What is the magic 
secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if 
there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to 
have too much to do ? ” 

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled 
menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it 
was now, about little Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to 
have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful 
sea rising. • 

On a night in mid- July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty- 
nine, Mr. Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself down 
by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, 
wild night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday 
night when they had looked at the lightning from the same 
place. 

“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig 
back, “that I should have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We 
have been so full of business all day, that we have not known 
what to do first, or which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness 
in Paris, that we have actually a run of confidence upon us ! Our 
customers over there, seem not to be able to confide their property 
to us fast enough. There is positively a mania among some of 
them for sending it to England.” 

“ That has a bad look,” said Darnay. 

“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay'? Yes, but we don’t 
know what reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable ! 
Some of us at Tellson’s are getting old, and we really can’t be 
troubled out of the ordinary course without due occasion.” 

“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening 
the sky is.” 

“ I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade 
himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, 
“but I am determined to be peevish after my long day’s bothera- 
tion. Where is Manette ? ” 

“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the 
moment. 

“I am quite glad you are at home ; for these hurries and fore- 
bodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have made 
me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope ? ” 


184 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“No; I am going to play backgammon with yon, if you like,’" 
said the Doctor. 

“ I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not 
fit to be pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, 
Lucie ? I can’t see.” 

“ Of course, it has been kept for you.” 

“ Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed ?” 

“ And sleeping soundly.” 

“ That’s right ; all safe and well ! I don’t knoAV why anything 
should be otherwise than safe and well here, thank God ; but I 
have been so put out all day, and I am not as young as I was ! 
My tea, my dear ! Thank ye. Now, come and take your place 
in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which 
you have your theory.” 

“Not a theory; it was a fancy.” 

“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. 
“ They are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not ? 
Only hear them ! ” 

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into 
anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained 
red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little 
circle sat in the dark London window. 

Saint Antoine’ had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of 
scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above 
the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the 
sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, 
and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled 
branches of trees in a winter wind : all the fingers convulsively 
clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was 
thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off. 

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, 
through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores 
at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, 
no eye in the throng could have told ; but, muskets were being 
distributed — so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars .of iron 
and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ing’enu- 
ity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing 
else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks 
out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine 
was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creat- 
ure there held life as of no account, and was demented with a pas- 
sionate readiness to sacrifice it. 

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


185 


raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop 
in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex 
where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and 
sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged 
this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and 
strove in the thickest of the uproar. 

“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do 
you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the 
head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my 
wife ? ” 

“ Eh, well ! Here you see me ! ” said madame, composed as 
ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame’s resolute right hand was 
occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and 
in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife. 

“ Where do you go, my wife ? ” 

“ I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me 
at the head of women, by-and-bye.” 

“ Come, then ! ” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “ Patriots 
and friends, we are ready ! The Bastille ! ” 

"With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had 
been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on 
wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. 
Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering 
on its new beach, the attack begun. 

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great 
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and 
through the smoke — in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast 
him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier 
— Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier. Two 
fierce hours. 

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great 
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down ! 
“Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, 
Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and- 
Twenty Thousand ; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils — 
which you prefer — work ! ” Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still 
at his gun, which had long grown hot. 

“ To me, women ! ” cried madame his wife. “ What I We can 
kill as well as the men when the place is taken ! ” And to her, 
with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed, but all 
armed alike in hunger and revenge. 

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke ; but, still the deep ditch, the 
single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great 
towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the fall- 


186 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


ing wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon- 
loads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all 
directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom 
smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea ; but, 
still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive 
stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the 
wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four 
fierce hours. 

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley — this dimly 
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it — sud- 
denly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept 
Defarge of the wine- shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the 
massive stone outer walls, in among the eight great towers sur- 
rendered ! 

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that 
even to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if 
he had been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was 
landed in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an 
angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques 
Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some 
of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife 
was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening 
and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb- 
show. 

“ The Prisoners ! ” 

“ The Records ! ” 

“ The secret cells ! ” 

“ The instruments of torture ! ” 

“ The Prisoners ! ” 

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, “ The Prison- 
ers ! ” was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if 
there were an eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When 
the foremost billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, 
and threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook re- 
mained undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of 
one of these men — a man with a grey head, who had a lighted 
torch in his hand — separated him from the rest, and got him be- 
tween himself and the wall. 

“ Show me the North Tower ! ” said Defarge. “ Quick ! ” 

“ I will faithfully,” replied the man, if you will come with me. 
But there is no one there.” 

“ What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower ? ” 
asked Defarge. “ Quick ! ” 

“ The meaning, monsieur ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


187 


“ Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity ? Or do you 
mean that I shall strike you dead 'I ” 

“ Kill him ! ” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up. 

“Monsieur, it is a cell.” 

“ Show it me ! ” 

“ Pass this way, then.” 

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently 
disappointed by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to ' 
promise bloodshed, held by Defarge’s arm as he held by the turn- 
key’s. Their three heads had been close together during this brief 
discourse, and it had been as much as they could do to hear one 
another, even then; so tremendous was the noise of the living 
ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the 
courts and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat 
the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some 
partial shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the air like spray. 

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, 
past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights 
of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, 
more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and 
Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they 
could make. Here and there, especially at first, the inundation 
started on them and swept by ; but when they had done descend- 
ing, and were winding and climbing up a tower, they were alone. 
Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls and arches, the 
storm within the fortress and without was only audible to them in 
a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they had come 
had almost destroyed their sense of hearing. 

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, 
swung the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads 
and passed !n : 

“ One hundred and five. North Tower ! ” 

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the 
wall, with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only 
seen by stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, 
heavily barred across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old 
feathery wood-ashes on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, 
and a straw bed. There were the four blackened walls, and a 
rusted iron ring in one of them. 

“ Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,” 
said Defarge to the turnkey. 

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with 
his eyes. 

“ Stop ! — Look here, Jacques ! ” 


188 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ A. M. ! ” croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily. 

“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the 
letters with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. 
“ And here he wrote ‘ a poor physician.’ And it was he, without 
doubt, who scratched a calendar on this stone. AVhat is that in 
your hand ? A crowbar ? Give it me ! ” 

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made 
a sudden exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the 
worm-eaten stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few blows. 

“ Hold the light higher ! ” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. 
“ Look among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see ! 
Here is my knife,” throwing it to him ; “ rip open that bed, and 
search the straw. Hold the light higher, you ! ” 

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, 
and, peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with 
the crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few 
minutes, some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he 
averted his face to avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, 
and in a crevice in the chimney into which his weapon had slipped 
or wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch. 

“ Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques ? ” 

“ Nothing.” 

“Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So ! 
Light them, you ! ” 

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. 
Stooping again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it 
burning, and retraced their way to the courtyard ; seeming to 
recover their sense of hearing as they came down, until they were 
in the raging flood once more. 

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. 
Saint Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop ‘keeper fore- 
most in the guard upon the governor who had defended the Bastille 
and shot the people. Otherwise, the governor would not be 
marched to the Hotel de Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the gov- 
ernor would escape, and the people’s blood (suddenly of some value, 
after many years of worthlessness) be unavenged. 

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed 
to encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and 
red decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was 
a woman’s. “ See, there is my husband ! ” she cried, pointing him 
out. “ See Defarge ! ” She stood immovable close to the grim old 
officer, and remained immovable close to him ; remained immovable 
close to him through the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore' him 
along ; remained immovable close to him when he was got near his 


A TALE OF TWO CUTES. 


189 


destination, and began to be struck at from behind ; remained im- 
movable close to him when the long-gathering rain of stabs and 
blows fell heavy ; was so close to him when he dropped dead under 
it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and 
with her cruel knife — long ready — hewed off his head. 

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his hor- 
rible idea of ^hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be 
and do. Saint Antoine’s blood was up, and the blood of tyranny 
and domination by the iron hand was down — down on the steps 
of the Hotel de Ville where the governor’s body lay — down on 
the sole of the shoe of Mada«ne Defarge where she had trodden on 
the body to steady it for mutilation. “ Lower the lamp yonder ! ” 
cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of death ; 
“ here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard ! ” The swinging 
sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on. 

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive up- 
heaving of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed 
and whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of tur- 
bulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in 
the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no 
mark on them. 

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expres- 
sion was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces — each seven 
in number — so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did 
sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces 
of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their 
tomb, were carried high overhead : all scared, all lost, all wonder- 
ing and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who re- 
joiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there 
were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and 
half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a 
suspended — not an abolished — expression on them ; faces, rather, 
in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the 
eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, “ Thou didst it ! ” 

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of 
the accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered 
letters and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of 
broken hearts, — such, and such-like, the loudly echoing footsteps 
of Saint Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid- J uly, one 
thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the 
fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her life ! 
For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous ; and in the years so 
long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s Avine-shop door, 
they are not easily purified when once stained red. 


100 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER XXII. 

THE SEA STILL EISES. 

Haggard Saint Antoine had had^ only one exultant week, in 
which to soften his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such 
extent as he could, with the relish of fraternal embraces and con- 
gratulations, when Madame Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, 
presiding over the customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in 
her head, for the great brotherhood of Spies had become, even in 
one short week, extremely chary of trusting themselves to the 
saint’s mercies. The lamps across his streets had a portentously 
elastic swing with them. 

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light 
and heat, contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, 
there were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but 
now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress. 
The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest head, had this 
crooked significance in it : “I know how hard it has grown for 
me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself ; but do you know 
how easy it has grown for me, the wearer oT this, to destroy life 
in you ? ” Every lean bare arm, that had been without work 
before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike. 
The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience 
that they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of 
Saint Antoine ; the image had been hammering into this for hun- 
dreds of years, and the last finishing blows had told mightily on 
the expression. 

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval 
as was to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. 
One of her sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump 
wife of a starved grocer, and the mother of two children withal, 
this lieutenant had already earned the complimentary name of 
The Vengeance. 

“ Hark ! ” said The Vengeance. “ Listen, then ! Who comes “? ” 

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint 
Antoine Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a 
fast-spreading murmur came rushing along. 

“It is Defarge,” said madame. “ Silence, patriots ! ” 

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and 
looked around him ! “ Listen, everywhere ! ” said madame again. 

“ Listen to him ! ” Defarge stood, panting, against a background 
of eager eyes and open mouths, formed outside the door ; all those 
within the wine-shop had sprung to their feet. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


191 


“ Say then, my husband. What is it ? ” 

“ News from the other world ! ” 

“ How, then ? ” cried madame, contemptuously. “ The other 
world ? ” 

“ Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished 
people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell ? ” 
“ Everybody ! ” from all throats. 

“ The news is of him. He is among us ! ” 

“ Among us ! ” from the universal throat again. “ And dead ? ” 
“Not dead ! He feared us so much — and with reason — that 
he caused himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock- 
funeral. But they have found him alive, hiding in the country, 
and have brought him in. I have seen him but now, on his way 
to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had reason 
to fear us. Say all ! Had he reason ? ” 

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if 
he had never knowm it yet, he would have known it in his heart of 
hearts if he could have heard the answering cry. 

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wdfe 
looked steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and 
the jar of a drum was heard as she moved it at her feet behind 
the counter. 

“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we 
ready ? ” 

Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle ; the drum 
was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flowm to- 
gether by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, 
and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at 
once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women. 

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which 
they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and 
came pouring down into the streets ; but, the women were a sight 
to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their 
bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and 
their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they 
ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, 
to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon 
taken, my sister ! Old Foulon taken, my mother I Miscreant 
Foulon taken, my daughter ! Then, a score of others ran into the 
midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and scream- 
ing, Foulon alive ! Foulon who told the starving people they might 
eat grass 1 Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, 
when I had no bread to give him I Foulon who told my baby it 
might suck grass, w^hen these breasts were dry with want 1 O 


192 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


mother of God, this Foiilon ! 0 Heaven, our snifering ! Hear 

me, my dead baby and my withered father : I swear on my knees, 
on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon ! Husbands, and brothers, 
and young men. Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of 
Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul 
of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, 
that grass may grow from him ! With these cries, numbers of 
the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and 
tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate 
swoon, and were only saved by the men belonging to them from 
being trampled under foot. 

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This 
Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, 
if Saint Antoine knew his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs ! 
Armed men and women flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and 
drew even these last dregs after them with such a force of suction, 
that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human creature in 
Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children. 

No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examina- 
tion where this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing 
into the adjacent open space and streets. The Defarges, husband 
and wife. The Vengeance, and Jacques Three, were in the first 
press, and at no great distance from him in the Hall. 

“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old 
villain bound with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of 
grass upon his back. Ha, ha ! That was well done. Let him 
eat it now ! ” Madame put her knife under her arm, and clapped 
her hands as at a play. 

The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the 
cause of her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again 
explaining to others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets 
resounded with the clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or 
three hours of drawl, and the winnowing of many bushels of words, 
Madame Defarge’s frequent expressions of impatience were taken 
up, with marvellous quickness, at a distance : the more readily, 
because certain men who had by some wonderful exercise of agility 
climbed up the external architecture to look in from the windows, 
knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a telegraph between her 
and the crowd outside the building. 

At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of 
hope or protection, directly down upon the old prisoner’s head. 
The favour was too much to bear ; in an instant tlie barrier of 
dust and chaff that had stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, 
and Saint Antoine had gpt him ! 



o 




THE SEA RISES 





194 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. 
Defarge had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the 
miserable wretch in a deadly embrace — Madame Defarge had but 
followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes with which he 
was tied — The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with 
them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the 
Hall, like birds of prey from their high perches — when the cry 
seemed to go up, all over the city, “ Bring him out ! Bring him 
to the lamp ! ” 

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building ; 
now, on his knees ; now, on his feet ; now, on his back ; dragged, 
and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that 
were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands ; torn, bruised, 
panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy ; 
now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space 
about him as the people ‘ drew one another back that they might 
see ; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs ; he 
was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal 
lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go — as a cat 
might have done to a mouse — and silently and composedly looked 
at him while they made ready, and while he besought her : the 
women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men 
sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. 
Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him 
shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they 
caught him shrieking ; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, 
and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the 
mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of. 

Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint Antoine 
so shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on 
hearing when the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, 
another of the people’s enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris 
under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine 
wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized him — would 
have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon com- 
pany — set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three 
spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession through the streets. 

Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the 
children, wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers’ shops 
were beset by long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad 
bread ; and while they waited with stomachs faint and empty, 
they beguiled the time by embracing one another on the triumphs 
of the day, and achieving them again in gossip. Gradually, these 
strings of ragged people shortened and frayed away ; and then poor 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


195 


lights began to shine in high windows, and slender fires were made 
in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in common, afterwards 
supping at their doors. 

^ Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as 
of most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship 
infused some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some 
sparks of cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who 
had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently 
with their meagre children ; and lovers, with such a world around 
them and before them, loved and hoped. 

It was almost morning, when Defarge’s wine-shop parted with 
its last knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame 
his wife, in husky tones, while fastening the door : 

“ At last it is come, my dear ! ” 

“ Eh well ! ” returned madame. “ Almost.” 

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept : even The Vengeance 
slept with her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The 
drum’s was the only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry 
had not changed. The Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could 
have wakened him up and had the same speech out of him as before 
the Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized ; not so with the hoarse 
tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine’s bosom. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

FIRE RISES. 

There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and 
where the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the 
stones on the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for 
I^atches to hold his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body 
together. The prison on the crag was not so dominant as of yore ; 
there were soldiers to guard it, but not many; there were officers 
to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men 
would do — beyond this : that it would probably not be what he 
was ordered. 

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desola- 
tion. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, 
was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything 
was bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, 
fences, domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil 
that bore them — all worn out. 

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a 


196 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


national blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite 
example of luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to 
equal purpose ; nevertheless. Monseigneur as a class had, somehow 
or other, brought things to this. Strange that Creation, designed 
expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed 
out ! There must be something short-sighted in the eternal arrange- 
ments, surely ! Thus it was, however ; and the last drop of blood 
having been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the 
rack having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and 
it now turned and turned with nothing to bite. Monseigneur began 
to run away from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable. 

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a 
village like it. For scores of years gone by. Monseigneur had 
squeezed it and wrung it, and had seldom graced it with his pres- 
ence except for the pleasures of the chase — now, found in hunting 
the people ; now, found in hunting the beasts, for whose preserva- 
tion Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and barren 
wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of strange 
faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high caste, 
chiselled, and otherwise beautified and beautifying features of Mon- 
seigneur. 

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in 
the dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and 
to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied 
in thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he 
would eat if he had it — in these times, as he raised his eyes from 
his lonely labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some 
rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was once a 
rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it ad- 
vanced, the mender of roads would discern without surprise, that 
it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in 
wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of 
roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many 
highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, 
sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways 
through woods. 

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July 
weather, as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such 
shelter as he could get from a shower of hail. 

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at 
the mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified 
these objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect 
that was just intelligible : 

“ How goes it, Jacques ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


107 


“All well, Jacques.” 

“ Touch then ! ” 

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones. 

“No dinner?” 

“ Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a 
hungry face. 

“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “ I meet no dinner any- 
where.” 

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and 
steel, pulled at it* until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly 
held it from him and dropped something into it from between his 
finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke. 

“ Touch' then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say 
it this time, after observing these operations. They again joined 
hands. 

“ To-night ?” said the mender of roads. 

“ To-night,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth. 

“Where?” 

“ Here.” 

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking 
silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like 
a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the 
village. 

“ Show me ! ” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the 
hill. 

“ See ! ” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. 
“You go down here, and straight through the street, and past 
the fountain ” 

“ To the Devil with all that ! ” interrupted the other, rolling his 
eye over the landscape, “/go through no streets and past no 
fountains. WelH ” 

“ Well ! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill 
above the village.” 

“ Good. When do you cease to work ? ” 

“At sunset.” 

“Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two 
nights without resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep 
like a child. Will you wake me ? ” 

“ Surely.” 

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped 
off his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap 
of stones. He was fast asleep directly. 

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, 
rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were 


198 


A TALE OP" TWO CITIES. 


responded to by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man 
(who wore a red cap now, in place of his blue one) seemed fasci- 
nated by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes were so often 
turned towards it, that he used his tools mechanically, and, one 
would have said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the shaggy 
black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough medley 
dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful 
frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and desperate 
compression of the iips in sleep, inspired the mender of roads with 
awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were footsore, 
and his ankles chafed and bleeding ; his great shoes, stuffed with 
leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long 
leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was 
into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to 
get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not ; but, in 
vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as reso- 
lutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades, guard- 
houses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of 
roads, to be so much air as against this figure. And when he 
lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in 
his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to 
centres all over France. 

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of 
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering 
lumps of (lull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun 
changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was 
glowing. Then, the mender of roads having got his tools to- 
gether and all things ready to go down into the village, roused 
him. 

“ Good ! ” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “ Two leagues 
beyond the summit of the hill 1 ” 

“Abgut.” 

“ About. Good ! ” 

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before 
him according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain, 
squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, 
and appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all 
the village. When the village had taken its poor supper, it did 
not creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, 
and remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was upon j 
it, and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark, j 
another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one 
direction only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, 
became uneasy ; went out on his house-top alone, and looked in i 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


199 


that direction too ; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the 
darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the sacris- 
tan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be need 
to ring the tocsin by-and-bye. 

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keep- 
ing its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they 
threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. 
Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at 
the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within ; uneasy 
rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old spears and 
knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains 
of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, 
and South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures 
crushed the high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cau- 
tiously to come together in the courtyard. Four lights broke out 
there, and moved away in different directions, and all was black again. 

But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself 
strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were grow- 
ing luminous. Then, a flickering streak played behind the archi- 
tecture of the front, picking out transparent places, and showing 
where balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared 
higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score of the 
great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces awakened, 
stared out of fire. 

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who 
were left there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding 
away. There was spurring and splashing through the darPness, 
and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and 
the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle’s door. “Help, 
Gabelle ! Help, every one ! ” The tocsin rang impatiently, but 
other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of 
roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with 
folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the 
sky. “It must be forty feet high,” said they, grimly ; and never 
moved. 

The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered 
away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the 
prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of ofiicers were looking 
at the fire ; removed from them, a group of soldiers. ^ “ Help, 
gentlemen-ofiicers ! The chateau is on fire ; valuable objects may 
be saved from the flames by timely aid ! Help, help ! ” The offi- 
cers looked towards the soldiers who looked at the fire ; gave no 
orders ; and answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, “ It must 
burn.” 


200 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, 
the village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two 
hundred and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman 
by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were 
putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The general 
scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed in a 
rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle ; and in a moment of 
reluctance and hesitation on that functionary’s part, the mender of 
roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages 
were good to make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast. 

The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roar- 
ing and raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight 
from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. 
With the rising and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as 
if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber 
fell, the face with the two dints in the nose became obscured : anon 
struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel 
Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire. 

The chateau burned ; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, 
scorched and shrivelled ; trees at a distance, fired by the four 
fierce figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. 
Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain ; 
the water ran dry ; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished 
like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells 
of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, 
like crystallisation ; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into 
the furnace ; four fierce figures trudged away. East, West, North, 
and South, along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon 
they had lighted, towards their next destination. The illuminated 
village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful 
ringer, rang for joy. 

Not only that; but the village, light headed with famine, fire, and 
bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do 
with the collection of rent and taxes — though it was but a small 
instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in 
those latter days — became impatient for an interview with him, 
and, surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for per- 
sonal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar 
his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of 
that conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his 
house-top behind his stack of chimneys ; this time resolved, if his 
door were broken in (he was a small Southern man of retaliative 
temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet, and 
crush a man or two below. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


201 


Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with 
the distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, 
combined with the joy-ringing, for music ; not to mention his 
having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his post- 
ing-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to 
displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole 
summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that 
plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved ! But, 
the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the 
village guttering out, the people happily dispersed, and Monsieur 
Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that while. 

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there 
were other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, 
whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, 
where they had been born and bred ; also, there were other villagers 
and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads and his 
fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned with 
success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the fierce 
figures w’ere steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be 
that as it would ; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude 
of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no function- 
ary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate success- 
fully. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK. 

In such risings of fire and risings of sea — the firm earth shaken 
by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was 
always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of 
the beholders on the shore — three years of tempest were consumed. 
Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden 
thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of her home. 

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the 
echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard 
the thronging feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds 
as the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with 
their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts, by 
terrible enchantment long persisted in. 

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phe- 
nomenon of his not being appreciated : of his being so little wanted 
in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal 
from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised 


202 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of 
him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but immediately 
fled ; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer back- 
wards for a great number of years, and performing many other 
'potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him 
in his terrors than he took to his noble heels. 

The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have 
been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never 
been a good eye to see with — had long had the mote in it of 
Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a mole’s blindness — 
but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that 
exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue, cor- 
ruption, and dissimulation, w^as all gone together. Royalty was 
gone ; had been besieged in its Palace and “suspended,” when the 
last tidings came over. 

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety- 
two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and 
wide. 

As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of 
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are supposed 
to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Mon- 
seigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used 
to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence 
as was most to be relied upon, came quickest. Again : Tellson’s 
was a munificent house, and extended great liberality to old cus- 
tomers who had fallen from their high estate. Again : those 
nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and anticipating 
plunder or confiscation, had made provident remittances to Tell- 
son’s, were always to be heard of there by their needy brethren. 
To which it must be added that every new-comer from France 
reported himself and his tidings at Tellson’s, almost as a matter of 
course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson’s was at that time, 
as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange ; and this was 
so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in 
consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes wrote the latest 
news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for 
all who ran through Temple Bar to read. 

On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Loriy sat at his desk, and 
Charles Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. 
The penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, 
was now the news-Exchange, and was filled to oveidiowing. It 
was within half an hour or so of the time of closing. 

“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” 
said Charles Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to 
you ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


203 


“ I understand. That I am too old ? ” said Mr. Lorry. 

“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travel- 
ling, a disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for 
you.” 

“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, 
“you touch some of the reasons for my going : not for my staying 
away. It is safe enough for me ; nobody will care to interfere 
with an old fellow of hard upon fourscore when there are so many 
people there much better worth interfering with. As to its being 
a disorganised city, if it were not a disorganised city there would 
be no occasion to send somebody from our House here to our House 
there, who knows the city and the business, of old, and is in Tell- 
son’s confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the long journey, 
and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit myself 
to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s, after all these 
years, who ought to be ? ” 

“ I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat 
restlessly, and like one thinking aloud. 

“ Indeed ! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise ! ” 
exclaimed Mr. Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And 
you a Frenchman born ? You are a wise counsellor.” 

“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that 
the thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has 
passed through my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having 
had some sympathy for the miserable people, and having abandoned 
something to them,” he spoke here in his former thoughtful manner, 
“ that one might be listened to, and might have the power to per- 
suade to some restraint. Only last night, after you had left us, 
when I was talking to Lucie ” ^ .• 

“ When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “ Yes. 
I wonder you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie ! 
Wishing you were going to France at this time of day ! ” 

“ However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile. 
“It is more to the purpose that you say you are.” 

“And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” 
Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you 
can have no conception of the difficulty with which our business 
is transacted, and of the peril in which our books and papers over 
yonder are involved. The Lord above knows what the compromis- 
ing consequences would be to numbers of people, if some of our 
documents were seized or destroyed ; and they might be, at any 
time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set afire to-day, 
or sacked to-morrow ! Now, a judicious selection from these witli 
the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or otherwise 


204 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


getting of them out of harm’s way, is within the power (without 
loss of precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if any one. 
And shall I hang back, when Tellson’s knows this and says this — 
Tellson’s, whose bread I have eaten these sixty years — because I 
am a little stiff about the joints ? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half a 
dozen old codgers here ! ” 

“How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. 
Lorry.” 

“Tut! Nonsense, sir! — And, my dear Charles,” said Mr. 
Lorry, glancing at the House again, “ you are to remember, that 
getting things out of Paris at this present time, no matter what 
things, is next to an impossibility. Papers and precious matters 
were this very day brought to us here (I speak in strict confidence ; 
it is not business-like to whisper it, even to you), by the strangest 
bearers you can imagine, every one of whom had his head hanging 
on by a single hair as he passed the Barriers. At another time, 
our parcels would come and go, as easily as in business-like Old 
England ; but now, everything is stopped.” 

“ And do you really go to-night ? ” 

“ I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to 
admit of delay.” 

“ And do you take no one with you 1 ” 

“All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have 
nothing to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry 
has been my body-guard on Sunday nights for a long time past, 
and I am used to him. Nobody will suspect Jerry of being any- 
thing but an English bull-dog, or of having any design in his head 
but to fiy at anybody who touches his master.” 

“I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and 
youthfulness.” 

“ I must say again, nonsense, nonsense ! When I have executed 
this little commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson’s proposal to 
retire and live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about 
growing old.” 

This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Loriy’s usual desk, with 
Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what 
he would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. 
It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a 
refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British ortho- 
doxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only 
harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as 
if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led 
to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of 
the misused and perverted resources that should have made them 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


205 


prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and 
had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such vapouring, 
combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the resto- 
ration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself, and 
worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be en- 
dured without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the 
truth. And it was such vapouring all about his ears, like a trouble- 
some confusion of blood in his own head, added to a latent uneasi- 
ness in his mind, which had already made Charles Darnay restless, 
and which still kept him so. 

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King’s Bench Bar, far 
on his way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme : 
broaching to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up 
and exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing with- 
out them : and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in 
their nature to the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the 
tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard with a particular feeling of 
objection ; and Darnay stood divided between going away that he 
might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his word, when 
the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out. 

The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and 
unopened letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any 
traces of the person to whom it was addressed ? The House laid 
the letter down so close to Darnay that he saw the direction — 
the more quickly because it was his own right name. The address, 
turned into English, ran : 

“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. 
Evrdmonde, of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson 
and Co., Bankers, London, England.” 

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one 
urgent and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of 
this name should be — unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obliga- 
tion — kept inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to be 
his name ; his own wife had no suspicion of the fact ; Mr. Lorry 
could have none. 

“ No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House ; “ I have referred 
it, I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where 
this gentleman is to be found.” 

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the 
Bank, there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. 
Lorry’s desk. He held the letter out inquiringly ; and Monseign- 
eur looked at it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refu- 
gee ; and Monseigneur looked at it in the person of that plotting 
and indignant refugee ; and Tliis, That, and The Other, all had 


206 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


something disparaging to say, in French or in English, concerning 
the Marquis who was not to be found. 

“Nephew, I believe — but in any case degenerate successor — 
of the polished Marquis who was murdered,” said one. “ Happy 
to say, I never knew him.” 

“A craven who abandoned his post,” said another — this Mon- 
seigneur had been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffo- 
cated, in a load of hay — “some years ago.” 

“ Infected with the new doctrines,” said a third, eyeing the 
direction through his glass in passing; “set himself in opposition 
to the last Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, 
and left them to the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, 
I hope, as he deserves.” 

“ Hey ? ” cried the blatant Stryver. “ Did he though % Is that 
the sort of fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D — n 
the fellow ! ” 

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. 
Stryver on the shoulder, and said : 

“ I know the fellow.” 

“Do you, by Jupiter? ” said Stryver. “ I am sorry for it.” 

“Why?” 

“Why, Mr. Darnay? D’ye hear what he did? Don’t ask, 
why, in these times.” 

“But I do ask why?” 

“ Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am 
sorry to hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here 
is a fellow, who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous 
code of devilry that ever was known, abandoned his property to 
the vilest scum of the earth that ever did murder by wholesale, 
and you ask me why I am sorry that a man who instructs youth 
knows him ? Well, but I’ll answer you. I am sorry because I 
believe there is contamination in such a scoundrel. That’s 
why.” 

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked him- 
self, and said : “You may not understand the gentleman.” 

“ I understand how to put i/ou in a corner, Mr. Darnay,” said 
Bully Stryver, “ and I’ll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I 
don’t understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. 
You may also tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly 
goods and position to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the 
head of them. But, no, gentlemen,” said Stryver, looking all round, 
and snapping his fingers, “I know something of human nature, 
and I tell you that you’ll never find a fellow like this fellow, trust- 
ing himself to the mercies of such precious No, gentle- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


207 


men ; he’ll always show ’em a clean pair of heels very early in the 
scuffle, and sneak away.” 

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver 
shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approba- 
tion of his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone 
at the desk, in the general departure from the Bank. 

“ Will you take charge of the letter ?” said Mr. Lorry. “ You 
know where to deliver it ? ” 

“I do.” 

“Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have 
been addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to for- 
ward it, and that it has been here some time ? ” 

“ I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here ? ” 

“From -here, at eight.” 

“I will come back, to see you off.” 

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other 
men, Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the 
Temple, opened the letter, and read it. These were its contents : 

“ Prison of the Abbaye, Paris. 
“June 21, 1792. 

“Monsieuk heeetofore the Marquis. 

“ After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the 
village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and 
brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suf- 
fered a great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed 
— razed to the ground. 

“ The crime for which I am imprisoned. Monsieur heretofore the 
Marquis, and for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, 
and shall lose my life (without your so generous help), is, they tell 
me, treason against the majesty of the people, in that I have acted 
against them for an emigi'ant. It is in vain I represent that I 
have acted for them, and not against, according to your commands. 
It is in vain I represent that, before the sequestration of emigrant 
property, I had remitted 'the imposts they had ceased to pay ; that 
I had collected no rent ; that I had had recourse to no process. 
The only response is, that I have acted for an emigrant, and where 
is that emigrant ? 

“ Ah ! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is 
that emigrant? I cry in my sleep where is he? I demand of 
Heaven, will he not come to deliver me? No answer. Ah 
Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I send my desolate cry across the 
sea, hoping it may perhaps reach your ears through the great bank 
of Tilson known at Paris ! 


208 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour 
of your noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Mar- 
quis, to succour and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to 
you. Oh Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true 
to me ! 

“ From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend 
nearer and nearer to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the 
Marquis, the assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service. 

“ Your afflicted, 

“ Gabelle.” 

The latent uneasiness in Darnay’s mind was roused to vigorous 
life by this letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, 
whose only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him 
so reproachfully in the face, that, as he walked to and fro in the 
Temple considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the 
passers-by. 

He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had 
culminated the bad deeds and bad reputation of the old family 
house, in his resentful suspicions of his uncle, and in the aversion 
with which his conscience regarded the crumbling fabric that he 
was supposed to uphold, he had acted imperfectly. He knew very 
well, that in his love for Lucie, his renunciation of his social place, 
though by no means new to his own mind, had been hurried and 
incomplete. He knew that he ought to have systematically 
worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to do it, 
and that it had never been done. 

The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of 
being always actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of 
the time which had followed on one another so fast, that the events 
of this week annihilated the immature plans of last week, and the 
events of the week following made all new again ; he knew very 
well, that to the force of these circumstances he had yielded ; — not 
without disquiet, but still without continuous and accumulating 
resistance. That he had watched the times for a time of action, 
and that they had shifted and struggled until the time had gone 
by, and the nobility were trooping from France by every highway 
and byway, and their property was in course of confiscation and 
destruction, and their very names were blotting out, was as well 
known to himself as it could be to any new authority in France 
that might impeach him for it. 

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man ; he 
was so far from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that 
he had relinquished them of his o^vn will, thrown himself on a 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


209 


world with no favour in it, won his own private place there, and 
earned his own bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the impoverished 
and involved estate on written instructions, to spare the people, to 
give them what little there was to give — such fuel as the heavy- 
creditors would let them have in the winter, and such produce as 
could be saved from the same grip in the summer — and no doubt 
he had put the fact in plea and proof, for his own safety, so that it 
could not but appear now. 

This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had 
begun to make, that he would go to Paris. 

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams 
had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it 
was drawing him to itself, and he must go. Everything that arose 
before his mind drifted him on, faster and faster, more and more 
steadily, to the terrible attraction. His latent uneasiness had been, 
that bad aims were being worked out in his own unhappy land by bad 
instruments, and that he who could not fail to know that he was 
better than they, was not tliere, trying to do something to stay 
bloodshed, and assert the claims of mercy and humanity. With 
this uneasiness half stifled, and half reproaching him, he had been 
brought to the pointed comparison of himself with the brave old 
gentleman in whom duty was so strong; upon that comparison 
(injurious to himself) had instantly followed the sneers of Mon- 
seigneur, which had stung him bitterly, and those of Stryver, which 
above all were coarse and galling, for old reasons. Upon those, 
had followed Gabelle’s letter : the appeal of an innocent prisoner, in 
danger of death, to his justice, honour, and good name. 

His resolution was made. He must go to Paris. 

Yos. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail 
on, until he struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any 
danger. The intention with which he had done what he had done, 
even although he had left it incomplete, presented it before him in 
an aspect that would be gratefully acknowledged in France on his 
presenting himself to assert it. Then, that glorious vision of doing 
good, which is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, 
arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion with some 
influence to guide this raging Revolution that was running so 
fearfully wild. 

As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered 
that neither Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was 
gone. Lucie should be spared the pain of separation ; and her 
father, always reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the danger- 
ous ground of old, should come to the knowledge of the step, as a 
step taken, and not in the balance of suspense and doubt. How 

p 


210 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


much of the incompleteness of his situation was referable to her 
father, through the painful anxiety to avoid reviving old associa- 
tions of France in his mind, he did not discuss with himself. But, 
that circumstance too, had had its influence in his course. 

He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was 
time to return to Tellson’s and take leave of Mr. Lorry. As soon 
as he arrived in Paris he would present himself to this old friend, 
but he must say nothing of his intention now. 

A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and 
Jerry was booted and equipped. 

“I have delivered that letter,” said Charles Darnay to Mr. 
Lorry. “I would not consent to your being charged with any 
written answer, but perhaps you will take a verbal one?” 

“ That I will, and readily,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it is not dan- 
gerous.” 

“Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye.” 

“ What is his name ? ” said Mr. Lorry, with his open pocket- 
book in his hand. 

“Gabelle.” 

“ Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle 
in prison ? ” 

“Simply, ‘that he has received the letter, and will come.’ ” 

“ Any time mentioned ? ” 

“He will start upon his journey to-morrow night.” 

“ Any person mentioned ? ” 

“No.” 

He helped Mr. Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and 
cloaks, and went out with him from the warm atmosphere of the 
old Bank, into the misty air of Fleet-street. “ My love to Lucie, 
and to little Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry at parting, “and take precious 
care of them till I come back.” Charles Darnay shook his head 
and doubtfully smiled, as the carriage rolled away. 

That night — it was the fourteenth of August — he sat up late, 
and wrote two fervent letters ; one was to Lucie, explaining the 
strong obligation he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at 
length, the reasons that he had, for feeling confident that he could 
become involved in no personal danger there ; the other was to the 
Doctor, confiding Lucie and their dear child to his care, and dwell- 
ing on the same topics with the strongest assurances. To both, 
he wrote that he would despatch letters in proof of his safety, 
immediately after his arrival. 

It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first 
reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter 
to preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly un- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


211 


suspicious. But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and 
busy, made him resolute not to tell her what impended (he had 
been half moved to do it, so strange it was to him to act in any- 
thing without her quiet aid), and the day passed quickly. Early 
in the evening he embraced her, and her scarcely less dear name- 
sake, pretending that he would return by-and-bye (an imaginary 
engagement took him out, and he had secreted a valise of clothes 
ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of the heavy streets, 
with a heavier heart. 

The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all 
the tides and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. 
He left his two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an 
hour before midnight, and no sooner ; took horse for Dover ; and 
began his journey. “For the love of Heaven, of justice, of gener- 
osity, of the honour of your noble name ! ” was the poor prisoner’s 
cry with which he strengthened his sinking heart, as he left all 
that was dear on earth behind him, and floated away for the Load- 
stone Rock. 


THE END OF THE SECOND BOOK. 


BOOK THE TmiXD. — THE TRACK OF A 
STORM. 


CHAPTER I. 

IN SECEET. 

The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris 
from England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hun- 
dred and ninety-two. More than enough of bad roads, bad equi- 
pages, and bad horses, he would have encountered to delay him, 
though the fallen and unfortunate King of France had been upon 
his throne in all his glory ; but, the changed times were fraught 
with other obstacles than these. Every town-gate and village tax- 
ing-house had its band of citizen-patriots, with their national mus- 
kets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers 
and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for 
their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them 
on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judg- 
ment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and In- 
divisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. . 

A very few French leagues of his journey were accomidished, 
when Charles Darnay began to perceive that for him along these 
country roads there was no hope of return until he should have 
been declared a good citizen at Paris. Whatever might befall now, 
he must on to his journey’s end. Not a mean village closed upon 
him, not a common barrier dropped across the road behind him, 
but he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred 
between him and England. The universal watchfulness so encom- 
passed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being for- 
warded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his 
freedom more completely gone. 

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway 
twenty times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in 
a day, by riding after him and taking him back, riding before him 

212 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


213 


and stopping him by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him 
in charge. He had been days upon his journey in France alone, 
when he went to bed tired out, in a little town on the high road, 
still a long way from Paris. 

Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle’s letter from 
his prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His diffi- 
culty at the guard-house in this small place liad been such, that he 
felt his journey to have come to a crisis. And he was, therefore, 
as little surprised as a man could be, to find himself awakened at 
the small inn to which he had been remitted until morning, in the 
middle of the night. 

Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots 
in rough red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down 
on the bed. 

“Emigrant,” said the functionary, “I am, going to send you on 
to Paris, under an escort.” 

“ Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I 
could dispense with the escort.” 

“Silence ! ” growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the 
butt-end of his musket. “ Peace, aristocrat ! ” 

“ It is as the good patriot says,” observed the timid functionary. 
“You are an aristocrat, and must have an escort — and must pay 
for it.” 

“I have no choice,” said Charles Darnay. 

“ Choice ! Listen to liim ! ” cried the same scowling red-cap. 
“As if it was not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron ! ” 

“ It is always as the good patriot says,” observed the functionary. 
“ Rise and dress yourself, emigrant.” 

Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where 
other patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleep- 
ing, by a watch-fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and 
hence he started with it- on the wet, wet roads at three o’clock in 
the morning. 

The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tricoloured 
cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one 
on either side of him. 

The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached 
to his bridle, the end of which one of tlie patriots kept girded round 
his wrist. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving 
in their faces : clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven 
town pavement, and out upon the mire-deep roads. In this state 
they traversed without change, except of horses and pace, all the 
mire-deep leagues that lay between them and the capital. 

They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after day- 


214 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


break, and lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so 
wretchedly clothed, that they twisted straw round their bare legs, 
and thatched their ragged shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart 
from the personal discomfort of being so attended, and apart from 
such considerations of present danger as arose from one of the 
patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying his musket very 
recklessly, Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint that was laid 
upon him to awaken any serious fears in his breast ; for, he reasoned 
with himself that it could have no reference to the merits of an 
individual case that was not yet stated, and of representations, con- 
firmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were not yet made. 

But when they came to the town of Beauvais — which they did 
at eventide, when the streets were filled with people — he could not 
conceal from himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming. 
An ominous crowd gathered to see him dismount at the posting- 
yard, and many voices called out loudly, “Down with the emi- 
grant ! ” 

He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and, 
resuming it as his safest place, said : 

“ Emigrant, my friends ! Do you not see me here, in France, 
of my own will ? ” 

“ You are a cursed emigrant,” cried a farrier, making at him in 
a furious manner through the press, hammer in hand ; “ and you 
are a cursed aristocrat ! ” 

The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the 
rider’s bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly 
said, “ Let him be ; let him be ! He will be judged at Paris.” 

“Judged!” repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. “Ay! 
and condemned as a traitor.” At this the crowd roared approval. 

Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse’s head 
to the yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle look- 
ing on, with the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he 
could make his voice heard : 

“ Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am 
not a traitor.” 

“ He lies ! ” cried the smith. “ He is a traitor since the decree. 
His life is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own ! ” 

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, 
which another instant would have brought upon him, the post- 
master turned his horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon 
his horse’s flanks, and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy 
double gates. The farrier struck a blow upon them with his ham- 
mer, and the crowd groaned ; but, no more was done. 

“What is this decree that the smith spoke of?” Darnay asked 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 215 

the postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him 
in the yard. 

“ Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants,” 

“ When passed ? ” 

“ On the fourteenth.” 

“ The day I left England ! ” 

“ Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be 
others — if there are not already — banishing all emigrants, and 
condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant 
when he said your life was not your own.” 

“ But there are no such decrees yet ? ” ' 

“ What do I know ! ” said the postmaster, shrugging his shoul- 
ders ; “ there may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What 
would you have ? ” 

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the 
night, and then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. 
Among the many wild changes observable on familiar things which 
made this wild ride unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity 
of sleep. After long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they 
would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, 
but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly 
manner in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand round a 
shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn up together singing a Lib- 
erty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in Beauvais that 
night to help them out of it, and they passed on once more into 
solitude and loneliness : jingling through the untimely cold and 
wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the 
earth that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt 
houses, and by the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp 
reining up across their way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all 
the roads. 

Daylight at last found them before the wall, of Paris. The 
barrier was closed and' strongly guarded when they rode up to it. 

“ Where are the papers of this prisoner ? ” demanded a resolute- 
looking man in authority, who was summoned out by the guard. 

Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay re- 
quested the speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller 
and French citizen, in charge of an escort which the disturbed 
state of the country had imposed upon him, and which he had 
paid for. 

“ Where,” repeated the same personage, without taking any heed 
of him whatever, “are the papers of this prisoner?” 

The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. 
Casting his eyes over Gabelle’s letter, the same personage in an- 


216 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


thority showed some disorder and surprise, and looked at Darnay 
with a close attention. 

He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and 
went into the guard-room ; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses out- 
side the gate. Looking about him while in this state of suspense, 
Charles Darnay observed that the gate was held by a mixed guard 
of soldiers and patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former ; 
and that while ingress into the city for peasants’ carts bringing in 
supplies, and for similar traffic and traffickers, was easy enough, 
egress, even for the homeliest people, was very difficult. A numer- 
ous medley of men and women, not to mention beasts and vehicles 
of various sorts, was waiting to issue forth ; but, the previous iden- 
tification was so strict, that they filtered through the barrier very 
slowly. Some of these people knew their turn for examination to 
be so far off, that they lay down on the ground to sleep or smoke, 
while others talked together, or loitered about. The red cap and 
tricolour cockade were universal, both among men and women. 

When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of 
these things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in 
authority, who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he 
delivered to the escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted, 
and requested him to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, 
leading his tired horse, turned and rode away without entering the 
city. 

He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of 
common wine and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, 
asleep and awake, drunk and sober, and in various neutral states 
between sleeping and waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were 
standing and lying about. The light in the guard-house, half de- 
rived from the waning oil-lamps of the night, and half from the 
overcast day, was in a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some 
registers were lying open on a desk, and an officer of a coarse, 
dark aspect, presided over these. 

^ “ Citizen Defarge,” said he to Darnay’s conductor, as he took a 
slip of paper to write on. “Is this the emigrant Evr^monde?” 

“ This is the man.” 

“ Your age, Evrdmonde 1 ” 

“ Thirty-seven.” 

“ Married, Evrdmonde ? ” . • ' 

“Yes.” 

“ Where married ? ” 

“ In England.” 

“Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evr^monde?” 

“ In England.” 


t 





wi''- 



^ 'i' liiPv^ 

•V * iWaU «ih 
J^M 


5«ii 



j 


BEFORE THE PRISON TRIBUNAL, 







218 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Without doubt. You are consigned, Evrdmonde, to the prison 
of La Force.” 

“ Just Heaven ! ” exclaimed Darnay. “ Under what law, and 
for what offence ? ” 

The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment. 

“We have new laws, Evrdmonde, and new offences, since you 
were here.” He said it with a hard smile, and went on writing. 

“ I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in 
response to that written appeal of a, fellow-countryman which lies 
before you. I demand no more than the opportunity to do so 
without delay. Is not that my right ? ” 

“ Emigrants have no rights, Evrdmonde,” was the stolid reply. 
The officer wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he 
had written, sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the words 
“ In secret.” 

Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must 
accompany him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed 
patriots attended them. 

“Is it you,” said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the 
guard-house steps and turned into Paris, “ who married the daughter 
of Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more ? ” 

“ Yes,” replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise. 

“My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter 
Saint Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.” 

“My wife came to your house to reclaim her father*? Yes ! ” 

The word “wife” seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to 
Defarge, to say with sudden impatience, “ In the name of that 
sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine, why did you 
come to France *? ” 

“You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it 
is the truth ? ” 

“A bad truth for you,” said Defarge, speaking with knitted 
brows, and looking straight before him. 

“ Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so 
changed, so sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will 
you render me a little help ? ” 

“None.” Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him. 

“ Will you answer me a single question ? ” 

“ Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.” 

“ In this prison that I am going to so unjustly^ shall I have 
some free communication with the world outside 1 ” 

“You will see.” 

“ I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means 
of presenting my case ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


219 


“ You will see. But, what then ? Other people have been 
similarly buried in worse prisons, before now.” 

“But never by me, Citizen Defarge.” 

Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a 
steady and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the 
fainter hope there was — or so Darnay thought — of his softening in 
any slight degree. He, therefore, made haste to say : 

“ It is of the utmost importance to me ( you know. Citizen, even 
better than I, of how much importance), that I should be able to 
communicate to Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank, an English gentleman 
who is now in Paris, the simple fact, without comment, that I have 
been thrown into the prison of La Force. Will you cause that to 
be done for me ? ” 

“ I will do,” Defarge doggedly rejoined, nothing for you. My 
duty is to my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of 
both, against you. I will do nothing for you.” 

Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his 
pride was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could 
not but see how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners 
passing along the streets. The very children scarcely noticed him. 
A few passers turned their heads, and a few shook their fingers at 
him as an aristocrat ; otherwise, that a man in good clothes should 
be going to prison, was no more remarkable than that a labourer in 
working clothes should be going to work. In one narrow, dark, and 
dirty street through which they passed, an excited orator, mounted 
on a stool, was addressing an excited audience on the crimes against 
the people, of the king and the royal family. The few words that he 
caught from this man’s lips, first made it known to Charles Darnay 
that the king was in prison, and that the foreign ambassadors had 
one and all left Paris. On the road (except at Beauvais) he had 
heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal watchful- 
ness had completely isolated him. 

That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which 
had developed themselves when he left England, he of course knew 
now. That perils had thickened about him fast, and might 
thicken faster and faster yet, he of course knew now. He could 
not but admit to himself that he might not have made this journey, 
if he could have foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his 
misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by the light of this later 
time, they would appear. Troubled as the future was, it was the un- 
known future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant hope. The 
horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, Avi^hin a few rounds 
of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed 
garnering time of harvest, was as far out of liis knowledge as if it 


220 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


had been a hundred thousand years away. The “sharp female 
newly-born, and called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, 
or to the generality of people, by name. The frightful deeds that 
M^ere to be soon done, were probably unimagined at that time in the 
brains of the doers. How could they have a place in the shadowy 
conceptions of a gentle mind 1 

Of unjust treatment in detention .and hardship, and in cruel sep- 
aration from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or 
the certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. 
With this on his mind, which was enough to carry into a dreary 
prison courtyard, he arrived at the prison of La Force. 

A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom 
Defarge presented “ The Emigrant Evrdmonde.” 

“ What the Devil ! How many more of them ! ” exclaimed the 
man with the bloated face. 

Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and 
withdrew, with his two fellow-patriots. 

“ What the Devil, I say again ! ” exclaimed the gaoler, left with 
his wife. “ How many more ! ” 

The gaoler’s wife, being provided with no answer to the question, 
merely replied, “One must have patience, my dear ! ” Three turn- 
keys who entered responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the senti- 
ment, and one added, “ For the love of Liberty ; ” which sounded 
in that place like an inappropriate conclusion. 

The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, 
and with a horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how 
soon the noisome flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in 
all such places that are ill cared for ! 

“In secret, too,” grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written 
paper. “ As if I was not already full to bursting ! ” 

He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles 
Darnay awaited his further pleasure for half an hour : sometimes, 
pacing to and fro in the strong arched room : sometimes, resting on 
a stone seat : in either case detained to be imprinted on the mem- 
ory of the chief and his subordinates. 

“ Come ! ” said the chief, at length taking up his keys, “ come 
with me, emigrant.” 

Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied 
him by corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking 
behind them, until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, 
crowded with prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at 
a long table, reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroider- 
ing ; the men were for the most part standing behind their chairs, 
or lingering up and down the room. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


221 


In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime 
and disgrace, the new comer recoiled from this company. But the 
crowning unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once 
rising to receive him, with every refinement of manner known to 
the time, and with all the engaging graces and courtesies of life. 

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison man- 
ners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate 
squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles 
Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all ! 
The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, 
the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the 
ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the 
desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by 
the death they had died in coming there. 

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and 
the other gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough 
as to appearance in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked 
so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and 
blooming daughters who were there — with the apparitions of the 
coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately bred 
— that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which the 
scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely, 
ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease 
that had brought him to these gloomy shades ! 

“ In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,” said 
a gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward, 
“I have the honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of con- 
doling with you on the calamity that has brought you among us. 
May it soon terminate happily ! It would be an impertinence 
elsewhere, but it is not so here, to ask your name and condition ? ” 

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required informa- 
tion, in words as suitable as he could find. 

“But I hope,” said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler 
with his eyes, who moved across the room, “ that you are not in 
secret ? ” 

“I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have 
heard them say so.” 

“ Ah, what a pity ! We so much regret it ! But take courage; 
several members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it 
has lasted but a short time.” Then he added, raising his voice, 
“ I grieve to inform the society — in secret.” 

There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed 
the room to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many 
voices — among which, the soft and compassionate voices of women 


222 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


were conspicuous — gave him good wishes and encouragement. 
He turned at the grated door, to render the thanks of his heart ; 
it closed under the gaoler’s hand ; and the apparitions vanished 
from his sight for ever. 

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When 
they had ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already 
counted them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed 
into a solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not dark. 

“ Yours,” said the gaoler. 

“ Why am I confined alone ? ” 

“ How do I know ! ” 

“ I can buy pen, ink, and paper ? ” 

“ Such, are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then. 
At present, you may buy your food, and nothing more.” 

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. 
As the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of 
the four walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered 
through the mind of the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite 
to him, that this gaoler was so un wholesomely bloated, both in face 
and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled 
with water. When the gaoler was gone, he thought in the same 
wandering way, “ Now am I left, as if I were dead.” Stopping 
then, to look down at the mattress, he turned from it with a sick 
feeling, and thought, “ And here in these crawling creatures is the 
first condition of the body after death.” 

“ Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, 
five paces by four and a half.” The prisoner walked to and fro in 
his cell, counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose 
like muffled drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. 
“ He made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes.” The prisoner 
counted the measurement again, and paced faster, to draw his mind 
with him from that latter repetition. “ The ghosts that vanished 
when the wicket closed. There was one among them, the appear- 
ance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in the embrasure 
of a window, and she had a light shining upon her golden hair, 
and she looked like * * * * Let us ride on again, for God’s sake, 
through the illuminated villages with the people all awake ! 
* * * * He made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes. # * * * 
Five paces by four and a half.” With such scraps tossing and 
rolling upward from the depths of his mind, the prisoner walked 
faster and faster, obstinately counting and counting ; and the roar 
of the city changed to this extent — that it still rolled in like 
muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he knew, in the 
swell that rose above them. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


223 


CHAPTER II. 

THE GRINDSTONE. 

Tellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of 
Paris, was in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard 
and shut off from the street by a high wall and a strong gate. 
The house belonged to a great nobleman who had lived in it until 
he made a flight from the troubles, in his own cook’s dress, and 
got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from 
hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other than the same 
Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had 
once occupied three strong men besides the cook in question. 

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving them- 
selves from the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more 
than ready and willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawn- 
ing Republic one and indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 
or Death, Monseigneur’s house had been first sequestrated, and then 
confiscated. For, all things moved so fast, and decree followed 
decree with^that fierce precipitation, that now upon the third night 
of the autumn month of September, patriot emissaries of the law 
were in possession of Monseigneur’s house, and had marked it with 
the tricolour, and were drinking brandy in its state apartments. 

A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of business 
in Paris, would soon have driven the House out of its mind and 
into the Gazette. For, what would staid British responsibility and 
respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, 
and even to a Cupid over the counter ? Yet such things were. 
Tellson’s had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen 
on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often 
does) at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must in- 
evitably have come of this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, Lon- 
don, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal 
boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and also of clerks 
not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest provocation. 
Yet, a French Tellson’s could get on with these things exceedingly 
well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had taken 
fright at them, and drawn out his money. 

What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and 
what would lie there, lost and forgotten ; what plate and jewels 
would tarnish in Tellson’s hiding-places, while the depositors rusted 
in prisons, and when they should have violently perished ; how 
many accounts with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this world, 
must be carried over into the next ; no man could have said, that 


224 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought 
heavily of these questions. He sat by a newly-lighted wood fire 
(the blighted and unfruitful year was prematurely cold), and on 
his honest and courageous face there was a deeper shade than the 
pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the room distortedly 
reflect — a shade of horror. 

He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of 
which he had grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced 
that they derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation 
of the main building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never 
calculated about that. All such circumstances were indifterent to 
him, so that he did his duty. On the opposite side of the court- 
yard, under a colonnade, was extensive standing for carriages — 
where, indeed, some carriages of Monseigneur yet stood. Against 
two of the pillars were fastened two great flaring flambeaux, and 
in the light of these, standing out in the open air, was a large 
grindstone : a roughly mounted thing which appeared to have 
hurriedly been brought there from some neighbouring smithy, or 
other .workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these 
harmless objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by 
the fire. He had opened, not only the glass window, but the 
lattice blind outside it, and he had closed both again, and he 
shivered through his frame. 

From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there 
came the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an 
indescribable ring in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted 
sounds of a terrible nature were going up to Heaven. 

“ Thank God,” said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, “ that no one 
near and dear to me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He 
have mercy on all who are in danger ! ” 

Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he 
thought, “ They have come back ! ” and sat listening. But, there 
was no loud irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and 
he heard the gate clash again, and all was quiet. 

The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that 
vague uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change would 
naturally awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well guarded, 
and he got up to go among the trusty people who were watching 
it, when his door suddenly opened, and two figures rushed in, at 
sight of which he fell back in amazement. 

Lucie and her father ! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, 
and with that old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensi- 
fied, that it seemed as though it had been stamped upon her face ex- 
pressly to give force and power to it in this one passage of her life. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


225 


“What is this?” cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused. 
“ What is the matter ? Lucie ! Manette ! What has happened ? 
What has brought you here ? What is it ? ” 

With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she 
panted out in his arms, imploringly, “ 0 my dear friend ! My 
husband ! ” 

“Your husband, Lueie?” 

“ Charles.” 

“What of Charles?” 

“ Here.” 

“ Here, in Paris ? ” 

“ Has been here some days — three or four — I don’t know how 
many — I can’t collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity 
brought him here unknown to us ; he was stopped at the barrier, 
and sent to prison.” 

The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same 
moment, the bell of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of 
feet and voices came pouring into the courtyard. 

“What is that noise?” said the Doctor, turning towards the 
window. 

“ Don’t look ! ” cried Mr. Lorry. “Don’t look out ! Manette, 
for your life, don’t touch the blind ! ” 

The Doetor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the 
window, and said, with a cool, bold smile : 

“ My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. ^ I have 
been a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris — in Paris ? 
In France — w^ho, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the 
Bastille, would touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, 
or carry me in triumph. My old pain has given me a power that 
has brought us through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles 
there, and brought us here. I knew it would be so ; I knew I 
could help Charles out of all danger ; I told Lucie so. — What is 
that noise ? ” His hand was again upon the window. 

“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. “No, 
Lucie, my dear, nor you I ” He got his arm round her, and held 
her. “ Don’t be so terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you 
that I know of no harm having happened to Charles ; that I had 
no suspicion even of his being in this fatal place. What prison 
is he in ? ” 

“ La Force I ” 

“ La Force 1 Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and ser- 
viceable in your life — and you were always both — you will com- 
pose yourself now, to do exactly as I bid you ; for more depends 
upon it than you can think, or I can say. There is no help for 

Q 


226 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


you in any action on your part to-night ; you cannot possibly stir 
out. I say this, because what I must bid you to do for Charles’s 
sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must instantly be 
obedient, still, and quiet. You must let me put you in a room 
at the back here. You must leave your father and me alone for 
two minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you 
must not delay.” 

“ I will be submissive to you. * I see. in your face that you know 
I can do nothing else than this. I know you are true.” 

The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and 
turned the key; then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and 
opened the window and partly opened the blind, and put his hand 
upon the Doctor’s arm, and looked out with him into the courtyard. 

Looked out upon a throng of men and women : not enough in 
number, or near enough, to fill the courtyard : not more than forty 
or fifty in all. The people in possession of the house had let them 
in at the gate, and they had rushed in to work at the grindstone ; 
it had evidently been set up there for their purpose, as in a con- 
venient and retired spot. 

But, such awful workers, and such awful work ! 

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly 
were two men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when 
the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more 
horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their 
most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches 
were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all 
bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and 
glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these 
ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward 
over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women 
held wine to their mouths that they might drink ; and what with 
dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the 
stream of sparks stmck out of the stone, all their wicked atmos- 
phere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature 
in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one an- 
other to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to 
the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in 
all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags ; men devilishly 
set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, vdth the 
stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives,^ 
bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it. 
Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who 
carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress : ligatures 
various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


227 


wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks 
and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their 
frenzied eyes ; — eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have 
given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun. 

All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, 
or of any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world 
if it were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doc- 
tor looked for explanation in his friend’s ashy face. 

“ They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully 
round at the locked room, “ murdering the prisoners. If you are 
sure of what you say ; if you really have the power you think you 
have — as I believe you have — make yourself known to these 
devils, and get taken to La Force. It may be too late, I don’t 
know, but let it not be a minute later ! ” ^ 

Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of 
the room, and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the 
blind. 

His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetu- 
ous confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like 
water, carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse at 
the stone. For a few moments there was a pause, and a hurry, 
and a murmur, and the unintelligible sound of his voice; and 
then Mr. Lorry saw him, surrounded by all, and in the midst of a 
line of twenty men long, all linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand 
to shoulder, hurried out with cries of — “Live the Bastille pris- 
oner ! Help for the Bastille prisoner’s kindred in La Force ! Room 
for the Bastille prisoner in front there ! Save the prisoner Evr^- 
monde at La Force ! ” and a thousand answering shouts. 

He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the 
window and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her 
father was assisted by the people, and gone in search of her hus- 
band. He found her child and Miss Pross with her ; but, it never 
occurred to him to be surprised by their appearance until a long 
time afterwards, when he sat watching them in such quiet as the 
night knew. 

Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his 
feet, clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on 
his own bed, and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside 
her pretty charge. 0 the long, long night, with the moans of the 
poor wife ! And 0 the long, long night, with no return of her 
father and no tidings ! 

Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded, 
and the irmption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and 
spluttered. “What is it?” cried Lucie, affrighted. “Hush! The 


228 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


soldiers’ swords are sharpened there,” said Mr. Lorry. “ The place 
is national property now, and used as a kind of armoury, my love.” 

Twice more in all ; but, the last spell of work was feeble and 
fitful. Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly de- 
tached himself from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked out 
again. A man, so besmeared that he might have been a sorely 
wounded soldier creeping back to consciousness on a field of slain, 
was rising from the pavement by the side of the grindstone, and 
looking about him with a vacant air. Shortly, this worn-out 
murderer descried in the imperfect light one of the carriages of 
Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle, climbed 
in at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest on its dainty 
cushions. 

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked 
out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser 
grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red 
upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away. 


CHAPTER III. 

THE SHADOW. 

One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind 
of Mr. Lorry when business hours came round, was this : — that 
he had no right to imperil Tellson’s by sheltering the wife of an 
emigrant prisoner under the Bank roof. His own possessions, 
safety, life, he would have hazarded for Lucie and her child, with- 
out a moment’s demur ; but the great trust he held was not his 
own, and as to that business charge he was a strict man of business. 

At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding 
out the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in ref- 
erence to the safest dwelling-place in the. distracted state of the 
city. But, the same consideration that suggested him, repudiated 
him ; he lived in the most violent Quarter, and doubtless was infiu- 
ential there, and deep in its dangerous workings. 

Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute’s 
delay tending to compromise Tellson’s, Mr. Lorry advised with 
Lucie. She said that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging 
for a short term, in that Quarter, near the Banking-house. As 
there was no business objection to this, and as he foresaw that even 
if it were all well with Charles, and he were to be released, he 
could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry went out in quest of 
such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up in a removed by- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


229 


street where the elosed blinds iii all the other windows of a high 
melancholy square of buildings marked deserted homes. 

To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and 
Miss Press : giving them what comfort he could, and much more 
than he had himself. He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill 
a doorway that would bear considerable knocking on the head, and 
returned to his own occupations. A disturbed and doleful mind 
he brought to bear upon them, and slowly and heavily the day 
lagged on with him. 

It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank 
closed. He was again alone in his room of the previous night, 
considering what to do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair. 
In a few moments, a man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly 
observant look at him, addressed him by his name. 

“ Your servant,” said Mr. Lorry. “ Do you know me ? ” 

He w^as a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty- 
five to fifty years of age. For answer he repeated, without any 
change of emphasis, the words : 

“ Do you know me ? ” 

“ I have seen you somewhere.” 

‘‘ Perhaps at my wine-shop ? ” 

Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said : “You come from 
Doctor Manette 1 ” 

“Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.” 

“ And what says he ? What does he send me '? ” 

Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It 
bore the words in the Doctor’s writing : 

“Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet. I 
have obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note from 
Charles to his wife. Let the bearer see his wife.” 

It was dated from La Force, within an hour. 

“Will you accompany me,” said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved 
after reading this note aloud, “to where his wife resides?” 

“Yes,” returned Defarge. 

Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and me- 
chanical way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they 
went down into the courtyard. There, they found two women; 
one, knitting. 

“ Madame Defarge, surely ! ” said Mr. Lorry, who had left her 
in exactly the same attitude some seventeen years ago. 

“ It is she,” observed her husband. 

“ Does Madame go with us ? ” inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that 
she moved as they moved. 


230 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know 
the persons. It is for their safety.” 

Beginning to be struck by Defarge’s manner, Mr. Lorry looked 
dubiously at him, and led the way. Both the women followed ; 
the second woman being The Vengeance. 

They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they 
might, ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted 
by Jerry, and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a 
transport by the tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and 
clasped the hand that delivered his note — little thinking what it 
had been doing near him in the night, and might, but for a chance, 
have done to him. 

“ Dearest, — Take courage. I am well, and your father has 
influence around me. You cannot answer this. Kiss our child 
for me.” 

That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her 
who received it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and 
kissed one of the hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, 
thankful, womanly action, but the hand made no response- — 
dropped cold and heavy, and took to its knitting again. 

There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She 
stopped in the act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with 
her hands yet at her neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge. 
Madame Defarge met the lifted eyebrows and forehead with a cold, 
impassive stare. 

“My dear,” said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; “there are 
frequent risings in the streets ; and, although it is not likely they 
will ever trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom 
she has the power to protect at such times, to the end that she 
may know them^ — that she may identify them. I believe,” said 
Mr. Lorry, rather halting in his reassuring words, as the stony 
manner of all the three impressed itself upon him more and more, 
“I state the case, Citizen Defarge?” 

Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer 
than a gruff sound of acquiescence. 

“You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to 
propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and 
our good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, 
and knows no French.” 

The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more 
than a match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress 
and danger, appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


231 


The Vengeance, whom her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am 
sure,^ Boldface ! I hope you are pretty well ! ” She also bestowed 
a British cough on Madame Defarge ; but, neither of the two took 
much heed of her. 

“ Is that his child % ” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work 
for the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie 
as if it were the finger of Fate. 

“Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor pris- 
oner’s darling daughter, and only child.” 

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed 
to fall so threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinc- 
tively kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. 
The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed 
then to fall, threatening and dark, on both the mother and the 
child. 

“It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “ I have 
seen them. We may go.” 

But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it — not 
visible and presented, but indistinct and withheld— -to alarm 
Lucie into saying, as she laid her appealing hand on Madame 
Defarge’s dress ; 

“You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no 
harm. You will help me to see him if you can ? ” 

“Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame 
Defarge, looking down at her with perfect composure. “ It is the 
daughter of your father who is my business here.” 

“ For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child’s 
sake ! She will put her hands together and pray you to be merci- 
ful. We are more afraid of you than of these others.” 

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her 
husband. Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail 
and looking at her, collected his face into a sterner expression. 

“ What is it that your husband says in that little letter ? ” asked 
Madame Defarge, with a lowering smile. “ Influence ; he says 
something touching influence 1 ” 

“That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from 
her breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on 
it, “has much influence around him.” 

“ Surely it will release him ! ” said Madame Defarge. “ Let it 
do so.” 

“ As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie, most earnestly, “ I implore 
you to have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you 
possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. 
0 sister- woman, think of me. As a wife and mother ! ” 


232 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and 
said, turning to her friend The Vengeance : 

“ The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we 
were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly 
considered ^ We have known their husbands and fathers laid in 
prison and kept from them, often enough ? All our lives, we have 
seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, 
poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and 
neglect of all kinds 1 ” 

“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance. 

“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge, turn- 
ing her eyes again upon Lucie. “Judge' you ! Is it likely that 
the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now h ” 

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance fol- 
lowed. Defarge went last, and closed the door. 

“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her. 
“Courage, courage ! So far all goes well with us — much, much 
better than it has of late gone with many poor • souls. Cheer up, 
and have a thankful heart.” 

“ I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to 
throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.” 

“ Tut, tut ! ” said Mr. Lorry ; “ what is this despondency in the 
brave little breast ? A shadow indeed ! No substance in it, Lucie.” 

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon 
himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly. 


CHAPTER IV. 

CALM IN STORM. 

Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth 
day of his absence. So much of what had happened in that dread- 
ful time as could be kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well 
concealed from her, that not until long afterwards, when France 
and she were far apart, did she know that eleven hundred de- 
fenceless prisoners of both sexes and all ages had been killed by 
the populace; that four days and nights had been darkened by 
this deed of horror ; and that the air around her had been tainted 
by the slain. She only knew that there had been an attack upon 
the prisons, that all political prisoners had been in danger, and 
that some had been dragged out by the crowd and murdered. 

To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of 
secrecy on which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


233 


him through a scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, 
in the prison he had found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before 
which the prisoners were brought gingly, and by which they were 
rapidly ordered to be put forth to be massacred, or to be released, 
or (in a few cases) to be sent back to their cells. That, presented 
by his conductors to this Tribunal, he had announced himself by 
name and profession as having been for eighteen years a secret 
and unaccused prisoner in the Bastille ; that, one of the body 
so sitting in judgment had risen and identified him, and that this 
man was Defarge. 

That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the 
table, that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had 
pleaded hard to the Tribunal — of whom some members were asleep 
and some awake, some dirty with murder and some clean, some 
sober and some not — for his life and liberty. That, in the first 
frantic greetings lavished on himself as a notable sufterer under 
the overthrown system, it had been accorded to him to have Charles 
Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and examined. That, 
he seemed on the point of being at once released, when the tide in 
his favour met with some unexplained check (not intelligible to the 
Doctor), which led to a few words of secret conference. That, the 
man sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette that 
the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his sake, be 
held inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the 
prisoner was removed to the interior of the prison again ; but, 
that he, the Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to 
remain and assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no 
malice or mischance, delivered to the concourse whose murderous 
yells outside the gate had often drowned the proceedings, that he 
had obtained the permission, and had remained in that Hall of 
Blood until the danger was over. 

The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep 
by intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners 
who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad 
ferocity against those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there 
was, he said, who had been discharged into the street free, but at 
whom a mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed out. 
Being besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had 
passed out at the same gate, and had found him in the arms of a 
company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies of their 
victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this 
awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the 
wounded man with the gentlest solicitude — had made a litter for 
him and escorted him carefully from the spot — had then caught 


234 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, 
that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands, and swooned 
away in the midst of it. • 

As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the 
face of his friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose 
within him that such dread experiences would revive the old danger. 
But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect : he had 
never at all known him in his present character. For the first time 
the Doctor felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. 
For the first time he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly 
forged the iron which could break the prison door of his daughter’s 
husband, and deliver him. “ It all tended to a good end, my friend ; 
it was not mere waste and ruin. As my beloved child was help- 
ful in restoring me to myself, I will be helpful now in restoring 
the dearest part of herself to her ; by the aid of Heaven I will do 
it ! ” Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw the 
kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm strong look and bearing 
of the man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, 
like a clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an 
energy which had lain dormant during the cessation of its useful- 
ness, he believed. 

Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with, 
would have yielded before his persevering purpose. While he 
kept himself in his place, as a physician, whose business was with 
all degrees of mankind, bond and free, rich and poor, bad and good, 
he used his personal influence so wisely, that he was soon the in- 
specting physician of three prisons, and among them of La Force. 
He could now assure Lucie that her husband was no longer con- 
fined alone, but was mixed with the general body of prisoners ; he 
saw her husband weekly, and brought sweet messages to her, 
straight from his lips ; sometimes her husband himself sent a letter 
to her (though never by the Doctor’s hand), but she was not per- 
mitted to write to him : for, among the many wild suspicions 
of plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants 
who were known to have made friends or permanent connections 
abroad. 

This new life of the. Doctor’s was an anxious life, no doubt ; still, 
the sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride 
in it. Nothing unbecoming tinged the pride ; it was a natural and 
worthy one ; but he observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, 
that up to that time, his imprisonment had been associated in the 
minds of his daughter and his friend, with his personal afiliction, 
deprivation, and weakness. Now that this was changed, and he 
knew himself to be invested through that old trial with forces to 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


235 


which they both looked for Charles’s ultimate safety and deliverance, 
he became so far exalted by the change, that he took the lead and 
direction, and required them as the weak, to trust to him as the 
strong. The preceding relative positions of himself and Lucie 
were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and affection could 
reverse them, for he could have had no pride but in rendering some 
service to her who had rendered so much to him. “ All curious 
to see,” thought Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, “but all 
natural and right ; so, take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it ; 
it couldn’t be in better hands.” '■ 

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to 
get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought 
to trial, the public current of the time set too strong and fast 
for him. The new era began ; the king was tried, doomed, and 
beheaded : the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, 
declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the 
black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre 
Dame ; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against 
the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, 
as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded 
fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, 
under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the 
North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds 
and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along 
the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea- 
shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge 
of the Year One of Liberty — the deluge rising from below, not 
falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven shut, not 
opened ! 

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting 
rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as 
regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning 
were the first day, other count of time there was none. Hold of 
it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of 
one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, 
the executioner showed the people the head of the king — and 
now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife 
which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and 
misery, to turn it grey. 

And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which 
obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so 
fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty 
thousand revolutionary committees all over the land ; a law of 
the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and 


236 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty 
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, 
and could obtain no hearing ; these things became the established 
order and nature of appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage 
before they were many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure 
grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the 
foundations of the world — the figure of the sharp female called 
La Guillotine. 

It was the popular theme for jests ; it was the best cure for 
headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it 
imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National 
Razor which shaved close : who kissed La Guillotine, looked 
through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the 
sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the 
Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross 
was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in w’here 
the Cross was denied. 

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most 
polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy- 
puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the 
occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the 
powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends 
of high public mark, tw^enty-one living and one dead, it had lopped 
the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of 
the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief func- 
tionary who worked it ; but, so armed, he was stronger than his 
namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God’s own 
Temple every day. 

Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the 
Doctor walked with a steady head : confident in his power, cau- 
tiously persistent in his end, never doubting that he would save 
Lucie’s husband at lastr Yet the current of the time sw^ept by, so 
strong and deep, and carried the time away so fiercely, that Charles 
had lain in prison one year and three months when the Doctor was 
thus steady and confident. So much more wicked and distracted 
had the Revolution grown in that December month, that the 
rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the vio- 
lently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and 
squares under the southern wintry sun. Still, the Doctor walked 
among the terrors with a steady head. No man better known 
than he, in Paris at that day; no man in a stranger situation. 
Silent, humane, indispensable in hospital and prison, using his art 
equally among assassins and victims, he was a man apart. In the 
exercise of his skill, the appearance and the story of the Bastille 


237 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 

Captive removed him from all otter men. He was not suspected 
or brought in question, any more 'than if he had indeed been 
recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were a Spirit mov- 
ing among mortals. 


CHAPTER V. 

THE WOOD-SAWYER. 

One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was 
never sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike 
off her husband’s head next day. Every day, through the stony 
streets, the tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. 
Lovely girls ; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey ; 
youths ; stalwart men and old ; gentle born and peasant born ; all 
red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the 
dark cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through 
the streets to slake her devouring thirst. Liberty, equality, fra- 
ternity, or death ; — the last, much the easiest to bestow, 0 
Guillotine ! 

If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of 
the time, had stunned the Doctor’s daughter into awaiting the 
result in idle despair, it would but have been with her as it was 
with many. But, from the hour when she had taken the white 
head to her fresh young bosom in the garret of Saint Antoine, she 
had been true to her duties. She was truest to them in the season 
of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good will always be. 

As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her 
father had entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged 
the little household as exactly as if her husband had been there. 
Everything had its appointed place and its appointed time. Little 
Lucie she taught, as regularly, as if they had all been united in 
their English home. The slight devices with which she cheated 
herself into the show of a belief that they would soon be reunited 
— the little preparations for his speedy return, the setting aside 
of his chair and his books — these, and the solemn prayer at night 
for one dear prisoner especially, among the many unhappy souls in 
prison and the shadow of death — were almost the only outspoken 
reliefs of her heavy mind. 

She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses, 
akin to mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as 
neat and as well attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days. 
She lost her colour, and the old and intent expression was a con- 
stant, not an occasional, thing; otherwise, she remained very 


238 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


pretty and comely. Sometimes, at night on kissing her father, 
she would burst into the grief she had repressed all day, and would 
say that her sole reliance, under Heaven, was on him. He always 
resolutely answered: “Nothing can happen to him without my 
knowledge, and I know that I can save him, Lucie.” 

They had not made the round of their changed life many weeks, 
when her father said to her, on coming home one evening : 

“ My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which 
Charles can sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. 
When he can get to it — which depends on many uncertainties and 
incidents ■ — he might see you in the street, he thinks, if you stood 
in a certain place that I can show you. But you will not be able 
to see him, my poor child, and even if you could, it would be unsafe 
for you to make a sign of recognition.” 

“ 0 show me the place, my father, and I will go there every 
day.” 

From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours. 
As the clock struck two, she was there, and at four she turned 
resignedly away. When it was not too wet or inclement for her 
child to be with her, they went together ; at other times she was 
alone ; but, she never missed a single day. 

It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street. The 
hovel of a cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only 
house at that end ; all else was wall. On the third day of her 
being there, he noticed her. 

“ Good day, citizen ess.” 

“ Good day, citizen.” 

This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had 
been established voluntarily some time ago, among the more 
thorough patriots ; but, was now law for everybody. 

“ Walking here again, citizeness ? ” 

“You see me, citizen ! ” 

The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of 
gesture (he had once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the 
prison, pointed at the prison, and putting his ten fingers before his 
face to represent bars, peeped through them jocosely. 

“But it’s not my business,” said he. And went on sawing his 
wood. 

Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her the mo- 
ment she appeared. 

“ Wha,t ? Walking here again, citizeness ? ” 

“Yes, citizen.” 

“ Ah ! A child too ! Your mother, is it not, my little citi- 
zeness ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


239 


“ Do I say yes, mamma ? ” whispered little Lucie, drawing close 
to her. 

“Yes, dearest.” 

“Yes, citizen.” 

“ Ah ! But it’s not my business. My work is my business. 
See my saw ! I call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la ; La, la, 
la ! And oft' his head comes ! ” 

The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket. 

“ I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here 
again ! Loo, loo, loo ; Loo, loo, loo ! And off her head comes ! 
Now, a child. Tickle, tickle ; Pickle, pickle ! And off its head 
comes. All the family ! ” 

Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, 
but it was impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at 
work, and not be in his sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good 
will, she always spoke to him first, and often gave him drink-money, 
which he readily received. 

He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite 
forgotten him in gazing at the prison roof and grates, and in lifting 
her heart up to her husband, she would come to herself to find him 
looking at her, with his knee on his bench and his saw stopped in 
its work. “ But it’s not my business ! ” he would generally say at 
those times, and would briskly fall to his sawing again. 

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter 
winds of spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of 
autumn, and again in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed 
two hours of every day at this place ; and every day on leaving it, 
she kissed the prison wall. Her husband saw her (so she learned 
from her father) it might be once in five or six times : it might be 
twice or thrice running : it might be, not- for a week or a fortnight 
together. It was enough that he could and did see her when the 
chances served, and on that possibility she would have waited out 
the day, seven days a week. 

These occupations brought her round to the December month, 
wherein her father walked among the terrors with a steady head. 
On a lightly-snowing afternoon she arrived at the usual corner. It 
was a day of some wild rejoicing, and a festival. She had seen the 
houses, as she came along, decorated with little pikes, and with 
little red caps stuck upon them ; also, with tricoloured ribbons ; 
also, with the standard inscription (tricoloured letters were the 
favourite). Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
ternity, or Death ! 

The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its 
whole surface furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He 


240 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


had got somebody to scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed 
Death in with most inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he 
displayed pike and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he 
had stationed his saw inscribed as his “ Little Sainte Guillotine ” 
— for the great sharp female was by that time popularly canonised. 
His shop was shut and he was not there, which was a relief to Lucie, 
and left her quite alone. 

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled move- 
ment and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A 
moment afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the 
corner by the prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood- 
sawyer hand in hand with The Vengeance. There could not be 
fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five 
thousand demons. There was no other music than their own sing- 
ing. They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a fero- 
cious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. Men and 
women danced together, women danced together, men danced to- 
gether, as hazard had brought them together. At first, they were a 
mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags ; but, as they 
filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly 
apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. 
They advanced, retreated, struck at one another’s hands, clutched 
at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one another and 
spun round in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those 
were down, the rest linked hand in hand, and all spun round to- 
gether : then the ring broke, and in separate rings of two and four 
they turned and turned until they all stopped at once, began again, 
struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the spin, and all spun 
round another way. Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck 
out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of the public way, 
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swoo^ied 
screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this 
dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport — a something, once 
innocent, delivered over to all devilry — a healthy pastime changed 
into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and 
steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the 
uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature 
were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty almost- 
child’s head thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough 
of blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time. 

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened 
and bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer’s house, the 
feathery snow fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had 
never been. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


241 


“ 0 my father ! ” for he stood before her when she lifted up the 
eyes she had momentarily darkened with her hand : “ such a cruel 
bad sight.” 

“ I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don’t 
be frightened ! Not one of them would harm you.” 

“I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think 
of my husband, and the mercies of these people ” 

“We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left him 
climbing to the window, and I came to tell you. There is no one 
here to see. You may kiss your hand towards that highest shelv- 
ing roof.” 

“ I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it ! ” 

“You cannot see him, my poor dear?” 

“No, father,” said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed 
her hand, “no.” 

A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. “I salute you, 
citizeness,” from the Doctor. “I salute you, citizen.” This in 
passing. Nothing more. Madame Defarge gone, like a shadow 
over the white road. 

“ Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here, with an air of 
cheerfulness and courage, for his sake. That was well done ; ” 
they had left the spot ; “ it shall not be in vain. Charles is sum- 
moned for to-morrow.” 

“ For to-morrow ! ” 

“ There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are 
precautions to be taken, that could not be taken until he was actu- 
ally summoned before the Tribunal. He has not received the 
notice yet, but I know that he will presently be summoned for 
to-morrow, and removed to the Conciergerie ; I have timely informa- 
tion. You are not afraid ? ” 

She could scarcely answer, “ I trust in you.” 

“Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; 
he shall be restored to you within a few hours ; I have encompassed 
him with every protection. I must see Lorry.” 

He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within 
hearing. They both knew too well what it meant. One. Two. 
Three. Three tumbrils faring away with their dread loads over 
the hushing snow. 

“I must see Lorry,” the Doctor repeated, turning her another way. 

The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust ; had never left 
it. He and his books were in frequent requisition as to property 
confiscated and made national. What he could save for the 
owners, he saved. No better man living to hold fast by what 
Tellson’s had in keeping, and to hold his peace. 

R 


242 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, 
denoted the approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they 
arrived at the Bank. The stately residence of Monseigneur was 
altogether blighted and deserted. Above a heap of dust and ashes 
in the court, ran the letters : National Property. Republic One 
and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death ! 

Who could that be with Mr. Lorry — the owner of the riding- 
coat upon the chair — who must not be seen ? From whom newly 
arrived, did he come out, agitated and surprised, to take his favour- 
rite in his arms ? To whom did he appear to repeat her faltering 
words, when, raising his voice and turning his head towards the 
door of the room from which he had issued, he said : “ Removed to 
the Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow ? ” 



\ 


CHAPTER VI. 


TRIUMPH. 


The dread Tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and 
determined Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every 
evening, and were read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to 
their prisoners. The standard gaoler-joke was, “Come out and 
listen to the Evening Paper, you inside there ! ” 

“ Charles Evrdmonde, called Darnay ! ” 

So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force. 

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot 
reserved for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. 
Charles Evrdmonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage ; 
he had seen hundreds pass away so. 

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced 
over them to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went 
through the list, making a similar short pause at each name. 
There were twenty-three names, but only twenty were responded 
to ; for one of the prisoners so summoned had died in gaol and been 
forgotten, and two had already been guillotined and forgotten. 
The list was read, in the vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen 
the associated prisoners on the night of his arrival. Every one of 
those had perished in the massacre ; every human creature he had 
since cared for and parted with, had died on the scaffold. 

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the part- 
ing was soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the 
society of La Force were engaged in the preparation of some games 
of forfeits and a little concert, for that evening. They crowded to 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


243 


the grates and shed tears there ; but, twenty places in the projected 
entertainments had to be refilled, and the time was, at best, short 
to the lock-up hour, when the common rooms and corridors would 
be delivered over to the great dogs who kept watch there through 
the night. The prisoners were far from insensible or unfeeling ; 
their ways arose out of the condition of the time. Similarly, though 
with a subtle difference, a species of fervour or intoxication, known, 
without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotine un- 
necessarily, and to die by it, was not mere boastfulness, but a wild 
infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, 
some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease — a terrible 
passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders 
hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them. 

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark ; the night 
in its vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen pris- 
oners were put to the bar before Charles Darnay’s name was called. 
All the fifteen were condemned, and the trials of the whole occu- 
pied an hour and a half. 

“ Charles Evr^monde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned. 

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats ; but the rough 
red cap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise 
prevailing. Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he 
might have thought that the usual order of things Avas reversed, 
and that the felons were trying the honest men. The lowest, 
cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never without its quantity of 
low, cruel, and bad, were the directing spirits of the scene : noisily 
commenting, applauding, disapproving, anticipating, and precipi- 
tating the result, without a check. Of the men, the greater part 
were armed in various ways ; of tlie women, some wore knives, 
some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many knitted. 
Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under 
her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a 
man whom he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but 
whom he directly remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she 
once or twice whispered in his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife ; 
but, what he most noticed in the two figures was, that although 
they were posted as close to himself as they could be, they never 
looked towards him. They seemed to be waiting for something 
with a dogged determination, and they looked at the Jury, but at 
nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his 
usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr. 
Lorry were the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, 
who wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb 
of the Carmagnole. 


244 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Charles Evr^monde, called Darnay, was accused by the public 
prosecutor as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, 
under the decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. 
It was nothing that the decree bore date since his return to France. 
There he was, and there was the decree ; he had been taken in 
France, and his head was demanded. 

“ Take off his head ! ” cried the audience. “ An enemy to the 
Republic ! ” 

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the 
prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in 
England ? 

Undoubtedly it was. 

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself? 

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the 
law. 

Why not ? the President desired to know. 

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distaste- 
ful to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left 
his country — he submitted before the word .emigrant in the pres- 
ent acceptation by the Tribunal was in use — to live by his own 
industry in England, rather than on the industry of the overladen 
people of France. 

What proof had he of this ? 

He handed in the names of two witnesses ; Th^ophile Gabelle, 
and Alexandre Manette. 

But he had married in England? the President reminded him. 

True, but not an English woman. 

A citizeness of France ? 

Yes. By birth. 

Her name and family ? 

“Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good 
physician who sits there.” 

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in ex- 
altation of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So capri- 
ciously were the people moved, that tears immediately rolled down 
several ferocious countenances which had been glaring at the. 
prisoner a moment before, as if with impatience to pluck him out 
into the streets and kill him. 

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had 
set his foot according to Doctor Manette’s reiterated instructions. 
The same cautious counsel directed every step that lay before him, 
and had prepared every inch of his road. 

The President asked, why had he returned to France when he 
did, and not sooner ? 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


245 


He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had 
no means of living in France, save those he had resigned ; whereas, 
in England, he lived by giving instruction in the French language 
and literature. He had returned when he did, on the pressing and 
written entreaty of a French citizen, who represented that his life 
was endangered by his absence. He had come back, to save a 
citizen’s life, and to bear his testimony, at whatever personal 
hazard, to the truth. Was that criminal in the eyes of the 
Republic ? 

The populace cried enthusiastically, “No! ’’and the President 
rang his bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued 
to cry “No 1 ” until they left off, of their own will. 

The President required the name of that citizen ? The accused 
explained that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred 
with confidence to the citizen’s letter, which had been taken from 
him at the Barrier, but which he did not doubt would be found 
among the papers then before the President. 

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there — had assured 
him that it would be there — and at this stage of the proceedings 
it was produced and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm 
it, and did so. Citizen Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and 
politeness, that in the pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal 
by the multitude of enemies of the Republic with which it had to 
deal, he had been slightly overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye 
— in fact, had rather passed out of the Tribunal’s patriotic remem- 
brance — until three days ago ; when he had been summoned 
before it, and had been set at liberty on the Jury’s declaring them- 
selves satisfied that the accusation against him was answered, 
as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evrdmonde, called 
Darnay. 

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popu- 
larity, and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression ; 
but, as he proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his 
first friend on his release from his long imprisonment ; that, the 
accused had remained in England, always faithful and devoted to 
his daughter and himself in their exile ; that, so far from being in 
favour with the Aristocrat government there, he had actually been 
tried for his life by it, as the foe of England and friend of the 
United States — as he brought these circumstances into view, with 
the greatest discretion and with the straightforward force of truth 
and earnestness, the Jury and the populace became one. At last, 
when he appealed by name to Monsieur Lorry, an English gentleman 
then and there present, who, like himself, had been a witness on 
tliat English trial and could corroborate his account of it, the Jury 


246 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


declared that they had heard enough, and that they were ready with 
their votes if the President were content to receive them. 

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the 
populace set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the 
prisoner’s favour, and the President declared him free. 

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the 
populace sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better im- 
pulses towards generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as 
some set-off against their swollen account of cruel rage. No 
man can decide now to which of these motives such extraordinary 
scenes were referable ; it is probable, to a blending of all the three, 
with the second predominating. No sooner was the acquittal pro- 
nounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood at another time, 
and such fraternal embraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by 
as many of both sexes as could rush at him, that after his long 
and unwholesome confinement he was in danger of fainting from 
exhaustion; none the less because he knew very well, that the 
very same people, carried by another current, would have rushed at 
him with the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew 
him over the streets. 

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were 
to be tried, rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five 
were to be tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic, foras- 
much as they had not assisted it by word or deed. So quick was 
the Tribunal to compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, 
that these five came down to him before he left the place, con- 
demned to die within twenty-four hours. The first of them told 
him so, with the customary prison sign of Death — a raised finger 
— and they all added in words, “ Long live the Republic ! ” 

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their pro- 
ceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, 
there was a great crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every 
face he had seen in Court — except two, for which he looked in 
vain. On his coming out, the concourse made at him anew, weep- 
ing, embracing, and shouting, all by turns and all together, until 
the very tide of the river on the bank of which the mad scene was 
acted, seemed to run mad, like the people on the shore. 

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and 
which they had taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its 
rooms or passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, 
and to the back of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its 
top. In this car of triumph, not even the Doctor’s entreaties could 
prevent his being carried to his home on men’s shoulders, with a 
confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


247 


from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once 
misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the 
tumbril on his way to the Guillotine. 

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and 
pointing him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy 
streets with the prevailing Republican colour,' in winding and 
tramping through them, as they had reddened them below the 
snow with a deeper dye, they carried him thus into the courtyard 
of the building where he lived. Her father had gone on before, to 
prepare her, and when her husband stood upon his feet, she dropped 
insensible in his arms. 

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between , 
his face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might 
come together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, 
all the rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard oveiHowed with the 
Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young 
woman from the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, 
and then swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets, 
and along the river’s bank, and over the bridge, the Carmagnole 
absorbed them every one and whirled them away. 

After grasping the Doctor’s hand, as he stood victorious and 
proud before him ; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came 
panting in breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of 
the Carmagnole ; after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to 
clasp her arms round his neck ; and after embracing the ever zeal- 
ous and faithful Pross who lifted her ; he took his wife in his arms, 
and carried her up to their rooms. 

“ Lucie ! My own ! I am safe.” 

“ 0 dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as 
I have prayed to Him.” 

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she 
was again in his arms, he said to her : 

“And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all 
this France could have done what he has done for me.” 

She laid her head upon her father’s breast, as she had laid his 
poor head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in 
the return he had made her, he was recompensed- for his suffering, 
he was proud of his strength. “You must not be weak, my dar- 
ling,” he remonstrated ; “don’t tremble so. I have saved him.” 


248 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER VII. 

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. 

“I HAVE saved him.” It was not another of the dreams in 
which he had often come back ; he was really here. And yet his 
wife trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was upon her. 

All, the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so 
passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly 
put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so im- 
possible to forget that many as blameless as her husband and as 
dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from 
which he had been clutched, that her heart could not be as light- 
ened of its load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the 
wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now the dreadful 
carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued them, 
looking for him among the Condemned ; and then she clung closer 
to his real presence and trembled more, 

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to 
this woman’s weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, 
no shoemaking, no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now ! 
He had accomplished the task he had set himself, his promise was 
redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let them all lean upon him. 

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind : not only because 
\ that was the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the 
^ people, but because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his 
imprisonment, had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his 
guard, and towards the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on 
this account, and partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no 
servant ; the citizen and citizeness who acted as porters at the 
courtyard gate, rendered them occasional service ; and Jerry (almost 
wholly transferred to them by Mr. Lorry) had become their daily 
retainer, and had his bed there every night. 

It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Lib- 
erty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost 
of every house, the name of every inmate must be legibly inscribed 
in letters of a certain size, at a certain convenient height from the 
ground. Mr. Jerry Cruncher’s name, therefore, duly embellished 
the doorpost down below; and, as the afternoon shadows deep- 
ened, the owner of that name himself appeared, from overlooking 
a painter whom Doctor Manette had employed to add to the list 
the name of Charles Evrdmonde, called Darnay. 

In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all 
the usual harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor’s 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


249 


little household, as in very many others, the articles of daily con- 
sumption that were wanted were purchased every evening, in small 
quantities and at various small shops. To avoid attracting notice, 
and to give as little occasion as possible for talk and envy, was the 
general desire. 

For some months past. Miss Pross and Mr. Cruncher had dis- 
charged the office of purveyors ; the former carrying the money ; 
the latter, the basket. Every afternoon at about the time when 
the public lamps were lighted, they fared forth on this duty, and 
made and brought home such purchases as were needful. Although 
Miss Pross, through her long association with a French family, 
might have known as much of their language as of her own, if she 
had had a mind, she had no mind in that direction ; consequently 
she knew no more of that “ nonsense ” (as she was pleased to call 
it) than Mr. Cruncher did. So her manner of marketing was to 
plump a noun-substantive at the head of a shopkeeper without any 
introduction in the nature of an article, and, if it happened not to 
be the name of the thing she w^anted, to look round for that thing, 
lay hold of it, and hold on by it until the bargain was concluded. 
She always made a bargain for it, by holding up, as a statement 
of its just price, one finger less than the merchant held up, what- 
ever his number might be. 

“Now, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red 
with felicity ; “if you are ready, I am.” 

Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Press’s service. He 
had worn all his rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky 
head down. 

“There’s all manner of things wanted,” said Miss Pross, “and 
we shall have a precious time of it. We want wine, among the 
rest. Nice toasts these Redheads will be drinking, wherever we 
buy it.” 

“ It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should 
think,” retorted Jerry, “whether they drink your health or the 
Old Un’s.” 

“ Who’s he ? ” said Miss Pross. 

Mr. Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning 
“Old Nick’s.” 

“ Ha ! ” said Miss Pross, “ it doesn’t need an interpreter to 
explain the meaning of these creatures. They have but one, and 
it’s Midnight Murder, and Mischief.” 

“ Hush, dear ! Pray, pray, be cautious ! ” cried Lucie. 

“ Yes, yes, yes. I’ll be cautious,” said Miss Pross ; “ but I may 
say among ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and 
tobaccoey smotherings in the form of embracings all round, going 


250 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


on in the streets. NOw, Ladybird, never you stir from that fire 
till I come back ! Take care of the dear husband you have recov- 
ered, and don’t move your pretty head from his shoulder as you 
have it now, till you see me again ! May I ask a question. Doctor 
Manette, before I go ? ” 

“I think you may take that liberty,” the Doctor answered, 
smiling. 

“For gracious sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite 
enough of that,” said Miss Pross. 

“ Hush, dear ! Again ? ” Lucie remonstrated. 

“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphati- 
cally, “ the short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His 
Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third ; ” Miss Pross 
curtseyed at the name; “and as such, my maxim is. Confound 
their politics. Frustrate their knavish tricks. On him our hopes 
we fix, God save the King ! ” 

Mr. Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the 
words after Miss Pross, like somebody at church. 

“ I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though 
I wish you had never taken that cold in your voice,” said Miss 
Pross, approvingly. “But the question. Doctor Manette. Is 
there ” — it was the good creature’s way to affect to make light 
of anything that was a great anxiety with them all, and to come 
at it in this chance manner — “is there any prospect yet, of our 
getting out of this place ? ” 

“ I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.” 

“ Heigh-ho-hum ! ” said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh 
as she glanced at her darling’s golden hair in the light of the fire, 
“ then we must have patience and wait : that’s all. We must 
hold up our heads and fight low, as my brother Solomon used to 
say. Now, Mr. Cruncher ! — Don’t you move. Ladybird ! ” 

They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and 
the child, by a bright fire. Mr. Lorry was expected back presently 
from the Banking ‘House. Miss Pross had lighted the lamp, but 
had put it aside in a corner, that they might enjoy the fire-light 
undisturbed. Little Lucie sat by her grandfather with her hands 
clasped through his arm : and he, in a tone not rising much above 
a whisper, began to tell her a story of a gi*eat and powerful Fairy 
who had opened a prison-wall and let out a captive who had once 
done the Fairy a service. All was subdued and quiet, and Lucie 
was more at ease than she had been. 

“ What is that ? ” she cried, all at once. 

“ My dear ! ” said her father, stopping in his story, and laying 
his liand on hers, “ command yourself. What a disordered state 



THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR. 




252 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


you are in ! The least thing — nothing — startles you ! You, 
your father’s daughter ! ” 

“ I thought, my father,” said Lucie, excusing herself, with a 
pale face and in a faltering voice, “ that I heard strange feet upon 
the stairs.” 

“ My love, the staircase is as still as Death.” 

As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door. 

“ Oh father, father. What can this be ! Hide Charles. Save 
him ! ” 

“ My child,” said the Doctor, rising, and laying his hand upon 
her shoulder, “I have saved him. What weakness is this, my 
dear ! Let me go to the door.” 

He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer 
rooms, and opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floor, and 
four rough men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols, entered 
the room. 

“ The Citizen Evrdmonde, called Darnay,” said the first. 

“ Who seeks him ^ ” answered Darnay. 

“ I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evrdmonde ; I saw 
you before the Tribunal to-day. You are again the prisoner of the 
Republic.” 

The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child 
clinging to him. 

“ Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner ? ” 

“ It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and 
will know to-morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow.” 

Doctor Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, 
that he stood with the lamp in his hand, as if he were a statue 
made to hold it, moved after these words were spoken, put the 
lamp down, and confronting the speaker, and taking him, not 
ungently, by the loose front of his red woollen shirt, said : 

“You know him, you have said. Do you know me? ” 

“Yes, I know you. Citizen Doctor.” 

“ We all know you. Citizen Doctor,” said the other three. 

He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower 
voice, after a pause : 

“Will you answer his question to me then? How does this 
happen ? ” 

“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, reluctantly, “he has been 
denounced to the Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen,” point- 
ing out the second who had entered, “is from Saint Antoine.” 

The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added ; 

“ He is accused by Saint Antoine.” 

“ Of what ? ” asked the Doctor. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


253 


“ Citizen Doctor,” said the first, with his former reluctance, “ask 
no more. If the Eepublic demands sacrifices from you, without 
doubt you as a good patriot will be happy to make them. The 
Republic goes before all. The People is supreme. Evr^monde, 
we are pressed.” 

“One word,” the Doctor entreated. “Will you tell me who 
denounced him V- < ^ 

“It is against rule,” answered the first ; “but you can ask Him 
of Saint Antoine here.” 

The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved un- 
easily on his feet, rubbed his beard a little, and at length said : 

“Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced — and 
gravely — by the Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one 
other.” 

“ What other ? ” 

“ Do ^ou ask. Citizen Doctor ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ Then,” said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, “ you 
will be answered to-morrow. Now, I am dumb ! ” 


CHAPTER VIII. 

A HAND AT CAKDS. 

Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home. Miss Pross 
threaded lier way along the narrow streets and crossed the river by 
the bridge of the Pont-Neuf, reckoning in her mind the number of 
indispensable purchases she had to make. Mr. Cruncher, with the 
basket, walked at her side. They both looked to the right and to 
the left into most of the shops they passed, had a wary eye for all 
gregarious assemblages of people, and turned out of their road to 
avoid any very excited group of talkers. It was a raw evening, 
•and the misty river, blurred to the eye with blazing lights and to 
the ear with harsh noises, showed where the barges were stationed 
in which the smiths worked, making guns for the Army of the 
Republic. Woe to the man who played tricks with that Army, or 
got undeserved promotion in it ! Better for him that his beard had 
never grown, for the National Razor shaved him close. 

Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure 
of oil for the lamp. Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they 
wanted. After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at 
the sign of the The Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, not far 
from the National Palace, once (and twice) the Tuileries, where the 


254 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


aspect of things rather took her fancy. It had a quieter look than 
any other place of the same description they had passed, and, though 
red with patriotic caps, was not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr. 
Cruncher, and finding him of her opinion. Miss Pross resorted to 
The Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, attended by her cavalier. 

Slightly observant of the smoky lights ; of the people, pipe in 
mouth, playing with limp cards and yellow dominoes ; of the one 
bare-breasted, bare- armed, soot-begrimed workman reading a journal 
aloud, and of the others listening to him; of the weapons worn, or 
laid aside to be resumed ; of the two or three customers fallen for- 
ward asleep, who in the popular high-shouldered shaggy black spen- 
cer looked, in that attitude, like slumbering bears or dogs ; the two 
outlandish customers approached the counter, and showed what they 
wanted. 

As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another 
man in a corner, and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss 
Pross. No sooner did he face her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, 
and clapped her hands. . 

In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That 
somebody was assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of 
opinion was the likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see some- 
body fall, but only saw a man and a woman standing staring at 
each other; the man with all the outward aspect of a Frenchman 
and a thorough Republican ; the woman, evidently English. 

What was said in this 'disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples 
of the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except ^lat it was 
something very voluble and loud, would have been as so much 
Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss Pross and her protector, though they 
had been all ears. But, they had no ears for anything in their sur- 
prise. For, it must be recorded, that not only was Miss Pross lost 
in amazement and agitation, but, Mr. Cruncher — though it seemed 
on his own separate and individual account — was in a state of the 
greatest wonder. 

“ What is the matter ” said the man who had caused Miss Pros^ 
to scream ; speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low 
tone), and in English. 

“ Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon ! ” cried Miss Pross, clapping her 
hands again. “ After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you 
for so long a time, do I find you here ! ” . 

“ Don’t call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me ? ” 
asked the man, in a furtive, frightened way. 

“ Brother, brother ! ” cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. 
“Have I ever been so hard with you that you ask me such a 
cruel question ? ” 


A TALE OF TAVO CITIES. 


255 


“ Then hold your meddlesome tongue,” said Solomon, “and come 
out, if you want to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come 
out. Who’s this man? ” 

Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no 
means affectionate brother, said through her tears, “Mr. Cruncher.” 

“Let him come out too,” said Solomdfl. “Does he think me a 
ghost ? ” 

Apparently, Mr. Cmncher did, to judge from his looks. He 
said not a word, how^ever, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of 
her reticule through her tears with great difficulty paid for her wine. 
As she did so, Solomon turned to the followers of the Good Repub- 
lican Brutus of Antiquity, and offered a few words of explanation 
in the French langiiage, which caused them all to rSlapse into their 
former places and pursuits. 

“ Now,” said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, “ what 
do you want 1 ” 

“ How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned 
my love away from ! ” cried Miss Pross, “ to give me such a greet- 
ing, and show me no affection.” 

“ There. Con-found it ! There,” said Solomon, making a dab 
at Miss Pross’s lips with his own. “ Now are you content ? ” 

Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence. 

“If you expect me to be surprised,” said her brother Solomon, 
“ I am not surprised; I knew you were here ; I know of most people 
who are here. If you really don’t want to endanger my existence 
— which I half believe you do — go your ways as soon as possible, 
and let me go mine. I am busy. I am an official.” 

“ My English brother Solomon,” mourned Miss Pross, casting up 
her tear-fraught eyes, “ that had the makings in him of one of the 
best and greatest of men in his native country, an official among 
foreigners, and such foreigners ! I would almost sooner have seen 
the dear boy lying in his ” 

“ I said so ! ” cried her brother, interrupting. “ I knew it. You 
want to be the death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my 
own sister. Just as I am getting on! ” 

“ The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid ! ” cried Miss Pross. 
“ Far rather would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I 
have ever loved you truly, and ever shall. Say but one affec- 
tionate word to me, and tell me there is nothing angry or estranged 
between us, and I will detain you no longer.” 

Good Miss Pross ! As if the estrangement between them had 
come of any culpability of hers. As if Mr. Lorry had not known 
it for a fact, years ago, in the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious 
brother had spent her money and left her I 


256 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more 
grudging condescension and patronage than he could have shown if 
their relative merits and positions had been reversed (which is invari- 
ably the case, all the world over), when Mr. Cruncher, touching him 
on the shoulder, hoarsely ^id unexpectedly interposed with the fol- 
lowing singular question : 

“ I say ! Might I ask the favour ? As to whether your name 
is John Solomon, or Solomon John?” 

The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had 
not previously uttered a word. 

“ Come ! ” said Mr. Cruncher. “ Speak out, you know.” (Which, 
by the way, was more than he could do himself) “John Solomon, 
or Solomon John? She calls you Solomon, and she must know, 
being your sister. And I know you’re John, you know. Which 
of the two goes first ? And regarding that name of Pross, like- 
wise. That warn’t your name over the water.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” 

“ Well, I don’t know all I mean, for I can’t call to mind what 
your name was, over the water.” 

“No?” 

“No. But I’ll swear it was a name of two syllables.” 

“ Indeed ? ” 

“ Yes. T’other one’s was one syllable. I know you. You was 
a spy-witness at the Bailey. What, in the name of the Father of 
Lies, own father to yourself, was you called at that time ? ” 

“Barsad,” said another voice, striking in. 

“ That’s the name for a thousand pound ! ” cried Jerry. 

The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his 
hands behind him under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood 
at Mr. Cruncher’s elbow as negligently as he might have stood at 
the Old Bailey itself 

“Don’t be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. 
Lorry’s, to his surprise, yesterday evening ; we agreed that I would 
not present myself elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could 
be useful ; I present myself here, to beg a little talk with* your 
brother. I wish you had a better employed brother than Mr. 
Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr. Barsad was not a Sheep of 
the Prisons.” 

Sheep was a cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaol- 
ers. The spy, who was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he 
dared 

“ I’ll tell you,” said Sydney. “ I lighted on you, Mr. Barsad, 
coming out of the prison of the Conciergerie while I was contem- 
plating the walls, an hour or more ago. You have a face to be 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


257 


remembered, and I remember faces well. Made curious by seeing 
you in that connection, and having a reason, to which you are no 
stranger, for associating you with the misfortunes of a friend now 
very unfortunate, I walked in your direction. I walked into the 
wine-shop here, close after you, and sat near you. I had no diffi- 
culty in deducing from your unreserved conversation, and the 
rumour openly going about among your admirers, the nature of 
your calling. And gradually, what I had done at random, seemed 
to shape itself into a purpose, Mr. Barsad.” 

“ What purpose 1 ” the spy asked. 

“ It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in 
the street. Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes 
of your company — at the office of Tellson’s Bank, for instance ? ” 

“ Under a threat 1 ” 

“Oh! Did I say that?” 

“Then, why should I go there?” 

“ Really, Mr. Barsad, I can’t say, if you can’t.” 

“ Do you mean that you won’t say, sir ? ” the spy irresolutely 
asked. 

“You apprehend me very clearly, Mr. Barsad. I w^on’t.” 

Carton’s negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid 
of his quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret 
mind, and with such a man as he had to do with. His practised 
eye saw it, and made the most of it. 

“ Now, I told you so,” said the spy, casting a reproachful look 
at his sister ; “if any trouble comes of this, it’s your doing.” 

“ Come, come, Mr. Barsad ! ” exclaimed Sydney. “ Don’t be 
ungrateful. But for my great respect for your sister, I might not 
have led up so pleasantly to a little proposal that I wish to make 
for our mutual satisfaction. Do you go with me to the Bank ? ” 

“ I’ll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I’ll go with you.” 

“ I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner 
of her own street. Let me take your arm. Miss Pross. This is 
not a good city, at this time, for you to be out in, unprotected ; 
and as your escort knows Mr. Barsad, I will invite him to Mr. 
Lorry’s with us. Are we ready ? Come then ! ” 

Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life 
remembered, that as she pressed her hands on Sydney’s arm and 
looked up in his face, imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, 
there was a braced purpose in the arm and a kind of inspiration in 
the eyes, which not only contradicted his light manner, but changed 
and raised the man. She was too much occupied then with fears 
for the brother who so little deserved her affedtion, and~With Syd- 
ney’s friendly reassurances, adequately to heed what she observed. 

s 


258 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


• They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way 
to Mr. Lorry’s, which was within a few^ minutes’ walk. John 
Barsad, or Solomon Pross, walked at his side. 

Mr. Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a 
cheery little log or two of fire — perhaps looking into their blaze 
for the picture of that younger elderly gentleman from Tellson’s, 
who had looked into the red coals at the Royal George at Dover, 
now a good many years ago. He turned his head as they entered, 
and showed the surprise with which he saw a stranger. 

“Miss Press’s brother, sir,” said Sydney. “Mr. Barsad.” 

“ Barsad ? ” repeated the old gentleman, “ Barsad ? I have an 
association with the name — and with the face.” 

“ I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr. Barsad,” observed 
Carton, coolly. “ Pray sit down.” 

As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr. Lorry 
wanted, by saying to him with a frown, “Witness at that trial.” 
Mr. Lony immediately remembered, and regarded his new visitor 
with an undisguised look of abhorrence. 

“ Mr. Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affection- 
ate brother you have heard of,” said Sydney, “ and has acknowledged 
the relationship. I pass to worse news. Darnay has been' arrested 
again.” 

Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, “ What 
do you tell me ! I left him safe and free within these two hours, 
and am about to return to him ! ” 

“ Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr. Barsad ? ” * 

“Just now, if at all.” 

“Mr. Barsad is the best authority possible, sir,” said Sydney, 
“and I have it from Mr. Barsad’s communication to a friend and 
brother Sheep over a bottle of wine, that the arrest has taken place. 
He left the messengers at the gate, and saw them admitted by 
the porter. There is no earthly doubt that he is retaken.” 

Mr. Lorry’s business eye read in the speaker’s face that it was 
loss of time to dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that 
something might depend on his presence of mind, he commanded 
himself, and was silently attentive. 

“Now, I trust,” said Sydney to him, “that the name and 
influence of Doctor Manette may stand him in as good stead 
to-morrow — you said he w^ould be before the Tribunal again 
to-morrow, Mr. Barsad? ” 

“ Yes ; I believe so.” 

“ — In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be 
so. I own to you, I am shaken, Mr. Lorry, by Doctor Manette’s 
not having had the power to prevent this arrest.” 



THE DOUBLE RECOGNITION 





260 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“He may not have known of it beforehand,” said Mr. Lorry. 

“But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we 
remember how identified he is with his son-in-law.” 

“ That’s true,” Mr. Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand 
at his chin, and his troubled eyes on Carton. 

“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when des- 
perate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor 
play the winning game; I will play the losing one. No man’s life 
here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people to-day, 
may be condemned to-morrow. Now, the stake I have resolved 
to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. 
And the friend I purpose to myself to win, is Mr. Barsad.” 

“You need have good cards, sir,” said the spy. 

“I’ll run them over. I’ll see what I hold, — Mr. Lorry, you 
know what a brute I am ; I wish you’d give me a little brandy.” 

It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful — drank off 
another glassful — - pushed the bottle thoughtfully away. 

“ Mr. Barsad,” he went on, in the tone of one who really was 
looking over a hand at cards : “ Sheep of the prisons, emissary of 
Republican committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy 
and secret informer, so much the more valuable here for being 
English that an Englishman is less open to suspicion of suborna- 
tion in those characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to 
his employers under a false name. That’s a very good card. Mr. 
Barsad, now in the employ of the republican French government, 
was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic English government, 
the enemy of France and freedom. That’s an excellent card. Infer- 
ence clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still 
in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of 
Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, 
the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of 
and so difficult to find. That’s a card not to be beaten. Have 
you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad ? ” 

“Not to understand your play,” returned the spy, somewhat 
uneasily. 

“I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest 
Section Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see 
what you have. Don’t hurry.” 

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, 
and drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking 
himself into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him. 
Seeing it, he poured out and drank another glassful. 

“Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time.” 

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


261 


cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Tlirown out of 
his honourable employment in England, through too much unsuc- 
cessful hard swearing there — not because he was not wanted there ; 
our English reasons for vaunting our superiority to secrecy and 
spies are of very modern date — he knew that he had crossed the 
Channel, and accepted* service in France: first, as a tempter and 
an eavesdropper among his own countrymen there : gradually, as a 
tempter and an eavesdropper among the natives. He knew that 
under the overthrown government he had been a spy upon Saint 
Antoine and Defarge’s wine-shop ; had received from the watchful 
police such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette’s 
imprisonment, release, and history, as should serve him for an 
introduction to familiar conversation with the Defarges ; and tried 
them on Madame Defarge, and had broken down with them sig- 
nally. He always remembered with fear and trembling, that that 
terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had 
looked ominously at him as her fingers moved. He had since seen 
her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over again produce 
her knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the guillo- 
tine then surely swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed 
as he was did, that he was never safe ; that flight was impossible ; 
that he was tied fast under the shadow of the axe ; and that b/ 
spite of his utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance o? 
the reigning terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once 
denounced, and on such grave grounds as had just now been sug- 
gested to his mind, he foresaw that the dreadful woman of whose un- 
relenting character he had seen many proofs, would produce against 
him that fatal register, and would quash his last chance of life. 
Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely 
cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing 
rather livid as he turned them over. 

“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the 
greatest composure. “ Do you play ? ” 

“ I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he 
turned to Mr. Lorry, “ I may appeal to a gentleman of your years 
and benevolence, to put it to this other gentleman, so much your 
junior, whether he can under any circumstances reconcile it to his 
station to play that Ace of which he has spoken. I admit that I 
am a spy, and that it is considered a discreditable station — though 
it must be filled by somebody ; but this gentleman is no spy, and 
why should he so demean himself as to make himself one ? ” 

“ I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer 
on himself, and looking at his watch, “ without any scruple, in a 
very few minutes.” 


262 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always 
striving to hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “ that your respect 
for my sister ” 

“ I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by 
finally relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton. 

“You think not, sir?” 

“ I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.” 

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his 
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, 
received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton, — who 
was a mystery to wiser and_ honester men than he, — that it fal- 
tered here and failed him. While be was at a loss, Carton said, 
resuming his former air of contemplating cards : 

“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression 
that I have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That 
friend and fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the 
country prisons ; who was he 1 ” 

“ French. You don’t know him,” said the spy, quickly. 

“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to 
notice him at all, though he echoed his word. “ Well ; he may 
be.” 

\ “Is, I assure you,” said the spy ; “though it’s not important.” 

“ Though it’s not important,” repeated Carton, in the same 

mechanical way — “though it’s not important No, it’s not 

important. No. Yet I know the face.” 

“ I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,” said the spy. 

“It — can’t — be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, 
and filling his glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. 
“Can’t — be. Spoke good French. Yet like a foreigner, I 
thought ? ” 

“Provincial,” said the spy. 

“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the 
table, as a light broke clearly on his mind. “ Cly ! Disguised, 
but the same man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey.” 

“ Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that 
gave his aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side ; “ there you 
really give me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreserv- 
edly admit, at this distance -of time, was a partner of mine) has 
been dead several years. I attended him in his last illness. He 
was buried in London, at the church of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. 
His unpopularity with the blackguard multitude at the moment 
prevented my following his remains, but I helped to lay him in 
his coffin.” 

Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


263 


remarkable goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, 
he discovered it to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and 
stiffening of all the risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher’s head. 

“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “ and let us be fair. To 
show you how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assump- 
tion yours is, I will lay before you a certificate of Cly’s burial, which 
I happened to have carried in my pocket-book,” with a hurried hand 
he produced and opened it, “ ever since. There it is. Oh, look at 
it, look at it ! You may take it in your hand ; it’s no forgery.” 

Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, 
and Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not 
have been more violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed 
by the Cow with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack built. 

Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched 
him on the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff. 

“ That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a taci- 
turn and iron-bound visage. “ So you put him in his coffin ? ” 

“I did.” 

“ Who took him out of it % ” 

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, “ What do you 
mean % ” 

“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn’t never in it. 
No ! Not he ! I’ll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.” 

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen ; they both looked 
in unspeakable astonishment at Jerry. 

“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and 
earth in that there coffin. Don’t go and tell me that you buried 
Cly. It was a take in. Me and two more knows it.” 

“ How do you know it ? ” 

“ What’s that to you % Ecod ! ” growled Mr. Cruncher, “ it’s 
you I have got a old grudge again, is it, with your shameful im- 
positions upon tradesmen ! I’d catch hold of your throat and choke 
you for half a guinea.” 

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement 
at this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moder- 
ate and explain himself. 

“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present 
time is ill-conwenient for explainin’. What I stand to, is, that he 
knows well wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let 
him say he was, in so much as a word of one syllable, and I’ll either 
catch hold of liis throat and choke him for half a guinea ; ” Mr. 
Cruncher dwelt upon this as quite a liberal offer ; “ or I’ll out and 
announce him.” 

“ Humph ! I see one thing,” said Carton. “ I hold another 


264 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


card, Mr. Barsad. Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspi- 
cion filling the air, for you to outlive denunciation, when you are 
in communication with another aristocratic spy of the same ante- 
cedents as yourself, who, moreover, has the mystery about him of 
having feigned death and come to life again ! A plot in the pris- 
ons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong card — a 
certain Guillotine card ! Do you play ? ” 

“ No ! ” returned the spy. “ I throw up. I confess that we 
were so unpopular with the outrageous mob, that I only got away 
from England at the risk of being ducked to death, and that Cly 
was so ferreted up and down, that he never would have got away 
at all but for that sham. Though how this man knows it was a 
sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.” 

“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the 
contentious Mr. Cruncher; “you’ll have trouble enough with giv- 
ing your attention to that gentleman. And look here ! Once 
more!” — Mr. Cruncher could not be restrained from making rather 
an ostentatious parade of his liberality — “I’d catch hold of your 
throat and choke you for half a guinea.” 

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, 
and said, with more decision, “ It has come to a point. I go on 
duty soon, and can’t overstay my time. You told me you had a 
proposal ; what is it ^ Now, it is of no use asking too much of 
me. Ask me to do anything in my office, putting my head in 
great extra danger, and I had better trust my life to the chances 
of a refusal than the chances of consent. In short, I should make 
that choice. You talk of desperation. We are all desperate here. 
Remember I I may denounce you if I think proper, and I can 
swear my way through stone walls, and so can others. Now, what 
do you want with me ? ” 

“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie ? ” 

“ I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape 
possible,” said the spy, firmly. 

“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a 
turnkey at the Conciergerie ? ” 

“ I am sometimes.” 

“You can be when you choose?” 

“ I can pass in and out when I choose.” 

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly 
out upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all 
spent, he said, rising : 

“ So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well 
that the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. 
Come into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


265 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE GAME MADE. 




While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the 
adjoining dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, 
Mr. Lorry looked at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. 
That honest tradesman’s manner of receiving the look, did not in- 
spire confidence ; he changed the leg on which he rested, as often 
as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he 
examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of 
attention ; and whenever Mr. Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken 
with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a 
hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity 
attendant on perfect- openness of character. 

“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.” 

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders 
in advance of him. 

“What have you been, besides a messenger?” 

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his 
patron, Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, 
“ Agricultooral character.” 

“ My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking 
a forefinger at him, “ that you have used the respectable and great 
house of Tellson’s as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful 
occupation of an infamous description. If you have, don’t expect 
me to befriend you when you get back to England. If you have, 
don’t expect me to keep your secret. Tellson’s shall not be im- 
posed upon.” 

“ I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “ that a gentle- 
man like yourself wot I’ve had the honour of odd jobbing till I’m 
grey at it, would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos 
so — I don’t say it is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be 
took into account that if it wos, it wouldn’t, even then, be all o’ 
one side. There’d be two sides to it. There might be medical 
doctors at the present hour, a picking up their guineas where a 
honest tradesman don’t pick up his fardens — fardens ! no, nor yet 
his half fardens — half fardens ! no, nor yet his quarter — a bank- 
ing away liker%moke at Tellson’s, and a cocking their medical eyes 
at that tradesman on the sly^ a going in and going out to their 
own carriages — ah ! equally like smoke, if not more so. Well, 
that ’ud be imposing, too, on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse the 
goose and not the gander. And here’s Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways 
wos in the Old England times, and would be to-morrow, if cause 


266 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


given, a floppin’ again the business to that degree as is ruinating 
— stark ruinating ! Whereas them medical doctors’ wives don’t 
flop — catch ’em at it ! Or, if they flop, their floppings goes in 
favour of more patients, and how can you rightly have one without 
the t’other? Then, wot with undertakers, and wot with parish 
clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot with private watchmen 
(all awaricious and all in it), a man wouldn’t get much by it, even 
if it wos so. And wot little a man did get, would never prosper 
with him, Mr. Lorry. He’d never have no good of it ; he’d want 
all along to be out of the line, if he could see his way out, being 
once in— even if it wos so.” 

“ Ugh ! ” cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless. “ I 
am shocked at the sight of you.” 

“Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,” pursued Mr. 
Cruncher, “even if it wos so, which I don’t say it is ” 

“Don’t prevaricate,” said Mr. Lorry. 

“No, I will not, sir,” returned Mr. Cruncher, as if nothing were 
further from his thoughts or practice — “ which I don’t say it is — 
wot I would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that 
there stool, at that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought 
up and growed up to be a man, wot will errand you, message you, 
general-light-job you, till your heels is where your head is, if such 
should be your wishes. If it wos so, which I still don’t say it is 
(for I will not prewaricate to you, sir), let that there boy keep his 
father’s place, and take care of his mother ; don’t blow upon that 
boy’s father — do not do it, sir — and let that father go into the 
line of the reg’lar diggin’, and make amends for what he would 
have un-dug — if it wos so — by diggin’ of ’em in with a will, 
and with conwictions respectin’ the futur’ keepin’ of ’em safe. 
That, Mr Lorry,” said Mr. Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his 
arm, as an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of 
his discourse, “is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A 
man don’t see all this here a goin’ on dreadful round him, in the 
way of Subjects without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to 
bring the price down to porterage and hardly that, without havin’ 
his serious thoughts of things. And these here would be mine, if 
it wos so, entreatin’ of you fur to bear in mind that wot I said just 
now, I up and said in the good cause when I might have kep’ it 
back.” 

“That at least is true,” said Mr: Lorry. “Say no more now. 
It may be that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and 
repent in action — not in words. I want no more words.” 

Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the 
spy returned from the dark room. “Adieu, Mr. Barsad,” said the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


267 


former; “our arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear 
from me.” 

He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry. 
When they were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done ? 

“Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have en- 
sured access to him, once.” 

Mr. Lorry’s countenance fell. 

“ It is all I could do,” said Carton. “ To propose too much, 
would be to put this man’s head under the axe, and, as he himself 
said, nothing worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It 
was obviously the weakness of the position. There is no.help for it.” 

“But access to him,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it should go ill before 
the Tribunal, will not save him.” 

“ I never said it would.” 

Mr. Lorry’s eyes gradually sought the fire ; his sympathy with 
his darling, and tire h^avy disappointment of his second arrest, 
gradually weakened them ; he was an oli^man now, overborne 
with anxiety of late, and his tears fell. ^\\\ 

“You are a good man and a true friend,” said 'Carton, in an al- 
tered voice. “Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I 
could not see my father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could 
not respect your sorrow more, if you were my father. You are 
free from that misfortune, however.” 

Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner, 
there was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and in 
his touch, that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of 
him, was wholly unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and 
Carton gently pressed it. 

“To return to poor Darnay,” said Carton. “Don’t tell Her of 
this interview, or this arrangement. It Avould not enable Her to 
go to see him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the 
worst, to convey to him the means of anticipating the sentence.” 

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at 
Carton to see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be ; he returned 
the look, and evidently understood it. 

“She might think a thousand things,” Carton said, “and any of 
them would only add to her trouble. Don’t speak of me to her. As 
I said to you when I first came, I had better not see her. I can 
put my hand out, to do any little helpful work for her that my hand 
can find to do, without that. You are going to her, I hope ? She 
must be very desolate to-night.” 

“ I am going now, directly.” 

“I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you 
and reliance on you. How does she look ? ” 


268 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.” 

“ Ah ! ” 

It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh — almost like a sob. 
It attracted Mr. Lorry’s eyes to Carton’s face, which was turned 
to the fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have 
said which), passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over 
a hill-side on a wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back 
one of the little flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He 
wore the white riding-coat and top-boots, then in vogue, and the 
light of the fire touching their light surfaces made him look very 
pale, with his long brown hair, all untrimmed, hanging loose about 
him. His indifference to fire was sufficiently remarkable to elicit a 
word of remonstrance from Mr. Lorry ; his boot was still upon the 
hot embers of the flaming log, when it had broken under the weight 
of his foot. . 

“I forgot it,” he said. J ^ ’ 

Mr. Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note 
of the wasted air which .clouded the naturally handsome features, 
and having the expression of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he 
was strongly reminded of that expression. 

“ And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir ? ” said Carton, 
turning to him. 

“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so 
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I 
hoped to have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted 
Paris. I have my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.” 

They were both silent. 

“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton, 
wistfully. 

“I am in my seventy-eighth year.” 

“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly 
occupied ; trusted, respected, and looked up to ? ” 

“ I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. 
Indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy.” 

“ See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people 
will miss you when you leave it empty ! ” 

“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his 
head. “ There is nobody to weep for me.” 

“ How can you say that ? Wouldn’t She weep for you ? Wouldn’t 
her child?” 

“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.” 

“ It is a thing to thank God for ; is it not ? ” 

“Surely, surely.” 

“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary lieart. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


269 


to-night, ‘I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the 
gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself 
a tender place in no regard ; I have done nothing good or service- 
able to be remembered by ! ’ your seventy-eight years would be 
seventy-eight heavy curses ; would they not ? ” 

“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.” 

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence 
of a few moments, said : 

“ I should like to ask you : — Does your childhood seem far off? 
Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very 
long ago ? ” 

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered : 

“ Twenty years back, yes ; at this time of my life, no. For, as 
I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer 
and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind 
smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by 
many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young 
mother (and I so old !), and by many associations of the days when 
what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults 
were not confirmed in me.” 

“ I understand the feeling ! ” exclaimed Carton, with a bright 
flush. “ And you are the better for it ? ” 

“ I hope so.” 

Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him 
on with his outer coat ; “ but you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to 
the theme, “you are young.” 

“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was 
never the way to age. Enough of me.” 

“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going 
out ? ” 

“ I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and 
restless habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, 
don’t be uneasy ; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the 
Court to-morrow ? ” 

“Yes, unhappily.” 

“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will 
find a place for me. Take my arm, sir.” 

Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the 
streets. A few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry’s destination. 
Carton left him there ; but lingered at a little distance, and turned 
back to the gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had 
heard of her going to the prison every day. “ She came out here,” 
he said, looking about him, “turned this way, must have trod on 
these stones often. Let me follow in her steps.” 


270 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of 
La Force, where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood- 
sawyer, having closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop- 
door, 

“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by ; 
for, the man eyed him inquisitively. 

“ Good night, citizen.” 

“ How goes the Kepublic ? ” 

“ You mean the Guillotine. Notill. Sixty-three to-day. We 
shall mount to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain 
sometimes, of being exhausted. Ha, ha, ha ! He is so droll, that 
Samson. Such a Barber ! ” 

“ Do you often go to see him ” 

“ Shave ? Always. Every day. What a barber ! You have 
seen him at work ? ” 

“ Never.” 

“ Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to 
yourself, citizen; he shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than 
two pipes ! Less than two pipes. Word of honour ! ” 

As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to 
explain how he timed the executioner. Carton was so sensible of a 
rising desire to strike the life out of him, that he turned away. 

“ But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “ though you 
wear English dress ? ” 

“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his 
shoulder. 

“You speak like a Frenchman.” 

“ I am an old student here.” 

“Aha, a perfect Frenchman ! Good night, Englishman.” 

“ Good night, citizen.” 

“ But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling 
after him. “And take a pipe with you ! ” 

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the 
middle of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his 
pencil on a scrap of paper. Then, traversing Avith the decided step 
of one who remembered the way Avell, several dark and dirty streets 
— much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares re- 
mained uncleansed in those times of terror — he stopped at a 
chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. 
A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thorough- 
fare, by a small, dim, crooked man. 

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his 
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “ Wliew ! ” the 
chemist whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi ! lii ! hi ! ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


271 


Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said ; 

“ For you, citizen ? ” 

“For me.” 

“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen ? You know 
the consequences of mixing them ? ” 

“ Perfectly.” 

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put 
them, one by one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the 
money for them, and deliberately left the shop. “ There is nothing 
more to do,” said he, glancing upward at the moon, “until to- 
morrow. I can’t sleep.” 

It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these 
words aloud under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expres- 
sive of negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner of a 
tired man, who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who 
at length struck into his road and saw its end. 

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competi- 
tors as a youth of great promise, he had followed his father to the 
grave. His mother had died, years before. These solemn words, 
which had been read at his father’s grave, arose in his mind as he 
went down the dark streets, among the heavy shadows, with the 
moon and the clouds sailing on high above him. “ I am the resur- 
rection and the life, saith the Lord : he that believeth in me, though 
he were dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth 
in me, shall never die.” 

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sor- 
row rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to 
death, and for to-morrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in the 
prisons, and still of to-morrow’s and to-morrow’s, the chain of asso- 
ciation that brought the words home, like a rusty old ship’s anchor 
from the deep, might have been easily found. He did not seek it, 
but repeated them and went on. 

With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people 
were going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the 
horrors surrounding them ; in the towers of the churches, where 
no prayers were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled 
that length of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors, 
plunderers, and profligates ; in the distant burial-places, reserved, 
as they wrote upon the gates, for Eternal Sleep ; in the abounding 
gaols ; and in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death 
which had become so common and material, that no sorrowful 
story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among the people out of 
all the working of the Guillotine ; with a solemn interest in the 
whole life and death of the city settling down to its short nightly 


272 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


pause in fury ; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for the 
lighter streets. 

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be 
suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on 
heavy shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, 
and the people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chat- 
ting home. At one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with 
a mother, looking for a way across the street through the mud. 
He carried the child over, and before the timid arm was loosed from 
his neck asked her for a kiss. 

“ I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord : he that be- 
lieveth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and whoso- 
ever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.” 

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the 
words were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly 
calm and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he 
walked ; but, he heard them always. 

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to 
the water as it splashed the river- walls of the Island of Paris, where 
the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the 
light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out 
of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned 
pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were 
delivered over to Death’s dominion. 

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that 
burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright 
rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a 
bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, 
while the river sparkled under it. 

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a con- 
genial friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, 
far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell 
asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lin- 
gered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and 
turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on 
to the sea. — “ Like me ! ” 

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, 
then glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its 
silent track in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken 
up out of his heart for a merciful consideration of all his poor blind- 
nesses and errors, ended in the words, “ I am the resurrection and 
the life.” 

Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to 
surmise where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


273 


nothing but a little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and 
changed to refresh himself, went out to the place of trial. 

The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep — whom 
many fell away from in dread — pressed him into an obscure corner 
among the crowd. Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor Manette was 
there. She was there, sitting beside her father. 

When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, 
so sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying 
tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the healthy 
blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated his heart. 
If there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her look, on 
Sydney Carton, it would have been seen to be the same influence 
exactly. 

Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of pro- 
cedure, ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. 
There could have been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and 
ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal 
vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds. 

Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patri- 
ots and good republicans as yesterday and the day before, and 
to-morrow and the day after. Eager and prominent among them, 
one man with a craving face, and his fingers perpetually hovering 
about his lips, whose appearance gave great satisfaction to the spec- 
tators. A life-thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman, 
the Jacques Three of St. Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of 
dogs empannelled to try the deer. 

Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prose- 
cutor. No favourable leaning in that quarter to-day. A fell, 
uncompromising, murderous business-meaning there. Every eye 
then sought some other eye in the crowd, and gleamed at it ap- 
provingly ; and heads nodded at one another, before bending forward 
with a strained attention. 

Charles Evrdmonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Re- 
accused and retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last 
night. Suspected and Denounced enemy of the Republic, Aristo- 
crat, one of a family of tyrants, one of a race proscribed, for that 
they had used their abolished privileges to tlie* infamous oppression 
of the people. Charles Evrdmonde, called Darnay, in right of such 
proscription, absolutely Dead in Law. 

To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor. 

The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or 
secretly ? 

“ Openly, President.” 

“ By whom ? ” 

T 


274 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of St. Antoine.” 

“ Good.” 

“ Th^r^se Defarge, his wife.” 

“Good.” 

“Alexandre Manette, physician.” 

A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it, 
Doctor Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he 
had been seated. 

“ President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery 
and a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my 
daughter. My daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to 
me than my life. Who and where is the false conspirator who says 
that I denounce the husband of my child ! ” 

“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the 
authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As 
to what is dearer to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good 
citizen as the Republic.” 

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his 
bell, and with warmth resumed. 

“If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your 
child herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen 
to what is to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent ! ” 

Frantic acclamations were , again raised. Doctor Manette sat 
down, with his eyes looking around, and his lips trembling; his 
daughter drew closer to him. The craving man on the jury rubbed 
his hands together, and restored the usual hand to his mouth. 

Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to 
admit of his being heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the 
imprisonment, and of his having been a mere boy in the Doctor’s 
service, and of the release, and of the state of the prisoner wlien 
released and delivered to him. This short examination followed, 
for the court was quick with its work. 

“ You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen ? ” 

“ I believe so.” 

Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd : “You were 
one of the best patriots there. Why not say so ? You were a can- 
nonier that day there, and you were among the first to enter the 
accursed fortress when it fell. Patriots, I speak the truth ! ” 

It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of 
the audience, thus assisted the proceedings. The President rang 
his bell ; but. The Vengeance, warming with encouragement, 
shrieked, “ I defy that bell ! ” wherein she was likewise much 
commended. 

“ Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bas- 
tille, citizen.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


276 


“ I knew,” said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at 
the bottom of the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily 
up at him ; “ I knew that this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been 
confined in a cell known as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. 
I knew it from himself. He knew himself by no other name than 
One Hundred and Five, North Tower, when he made shoes under 
my care. As I serve my gun that day, I resolve, when the place 
shall fall, to examine that cell. It falls. I mount to the cell, with 
a fellow-citizen who is one of the Jury, directed by a gaoler. I 
examine it, very closely. In a hole in the chimney, where a stone 
has been worked out and replaced, I find a written paper. This 
is that written paper. I have made it my business to examine 
some specimens of the writing of Doctor Manette. This is the 
writing of Doctor Manette. I confide this paper, in the writing of 
Doctor Manette, to the hands of the President.” 

“ Let it be read.” 

In a dead silence and stillness — the prisoner under trial looking 
lovingly at his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with 
solicitude at her father. Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on 
the reader, Madame Defarge never taking hers from the prisoner, 
Defarge never taking his from his feasting wife, and all the other 
eyes there intent upon the Doctor, who saw none of them — the 
paper was read, as follows. 


CHAPTER X. 

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE SHADOW. 

“I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of 
Beauvais, and afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy 
paper in my doleful cell in the Bastille, during the last month of 
the year, 1767. I write it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. 
I design to secrete it in the wall of the chimney, where I have 
slowly and laboriously made a place of concealment for it. Some 
pitying hand may find it there, when I and my sorrows are 
dust. 

“ These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I 
write with difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the 
chimney, mixed with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of 
my captivity. Hope has quite departed from my breast. I know 
from terrible warnings I have noted in myself that my reason will 
not long remain unimpaired, but I solemnly declare that I am at 
this time in the possession of my right mind — that my memory is 
exact and circumstantial — and that I write the trutli as I sliall 


276 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


answer for these my last recorded words, whether they be ever 
read by men or not, at the Eternal J udgment-seat. 

“ One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December 
(I think the twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was 
walking on a retired part of the quay by the Seine for the refresh- 
ment of the frosty -air, at an hour’s distance from my place of resi- 
dence in the Street of the School of Medicine, when a carriage came 
along behind me, driven very fast. As I stood aside to let that car- 
riage pass, apprehensive that it might otherwise run me down, a 
head was put out at the window, and a voice called to the driver 
to stop. 

“ The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his 
horses, and the same voice called to me by my name. I answered. 
The carriage was then so far in advance of me that two gentlemen 
had time to open the door and alight before I came up with it. I 
observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks, and appeared to 
conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the carriage 
door, I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, 
or rather younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, 
manner, voice, and (as far as I could see) face too. 

“ ‘ You are Doctor Manette ? ’ said one. 

“ ‘ I am.’ 

“‘Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,’ said the other; ‘the 
young physician, originally an expert surgeon, who within the last 
year or two has made a rising reputation in Paris ? ’ 

“ ‘ Gentlemen,’ I returned, ‘ I am that Doctor Manette of whom 
you speak so graciously.’ 

“ ‘ We have been to your residence,’ said the first, ‘ and not being 
so fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were 
probably walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of over- 
taking you. Will you please to enter the carriage ? ’ 

“ The maimer of both was imperious, and they both moved, as 
these words were spoken, so as to place me between themselves 
and the carriage door. They were armed. I was not. 

“ ‘ Gentlemen,’ said I, ‘pardon me; but I usually inquire who 
does me the honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature 
of the case to which I am summoned.’ 

“ The reply to this was made by him who had spoken second. 
‘ Doctor, your clients are people of condition. As to the nature of 
the case, our confidence in your skill assures us that you will ascer- 
tain it for yourself better than we can describe it. Enough. Will 
you please to enter the carriage ? ’ 

“I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. 
They both entered after me — the last springing in, after putting 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 277 

up the steps. The carriage turned about, and drove on at its 
former speed. 

“ I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no 
doubt that it is, word for word, the same. I describe everything 
exactly as it took place, constraining my mind not to wander from 
the task. Where I make the broken marks that follow here, I 
leave off for the time, and put my paper in its hiding-place. # * * * 

“ The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, 
and emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league 
from the Barrier — I did not estimate the distance at that time, 
but afterwards when I traversed it — it struck out of the main 
avenue, and presently stopped at a solitary house. We all three 
alighted, and walked, by a damp soft footpath in a garden where a 
neglected fountain had overflowed, to the door of the house. It 
was not opened immediately, in answer to the ringing of the bell, 
and one of my two conductors struck the man who opened it, with 
his heavy riding glove, across the face. 

“ There was nothing in this action to attract my particular at- 
tention, for I had seen common people struck more commonly than 
dogs. But, the other of the two, being angry likewise, struck the 
man in like manner with his arm ; the look and bearing of the 
brothers were then so exactly alike, that I then first perceived them 
to be twin brothers. 

“ From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we 
found locked, and which one of the brothers had opened to admit 
us, and had relocked), I had heard cries proceeding from an upper 
chamber. I was conducted to this chamber straight, the cries 
growing louder as we ascended the stairs, and I found a patient in 
a high fever of the brain, lying on a bed. 

“ The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young ; assur- 
edly not much past twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and 
her arms were bound to her sides with sashes and handkerchiefs. 
I noticed that these bonds were all portions of a gentleman’s dress. 
On one of them, which was a fringed scarf for a dress of ceremony, 
I saw the armorial bearings of a Noble, and the letter E. 

“I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of 
the patient ; for, in her restless strivings she had turned over on 
her face on the edge of the bed, had drawn the end of the scarf 
into her mouth, and was in danger of suffocation. My first act 
was to put out my hand to relieve her breathing ; and in moving 
the scarf aside, the embroidery in the corner caught my sight. 

“ I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to 
calm her and keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes 
were dilated and wild, and slie constantly uttered piercing shrieks, 


278 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


and repeated the words, ‘ My husband, my father, and my brother ! ’ 
and then counted up to twelve, and said, ‘Hush!’ For an in- 
stant, and no more, she would pause to listen, and then the pierc- 
ing shrieks would begin again, and she would repeat the cry, ‘ My 
husband, my father, and my brother ! ’ and would count up to 
twelve, and say, ‘ Hush ! ’ There was no variation in the order, 
or the manner. There was no cessation, but the regular moment’s 
pause, in the utterance of these sounds. 

“ ‘ How long,’ I asked, ‘ has this lasted ? ’ 

“ To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the 
younger ; by the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority. 
It was the elder who replied, ‘ Since about this hour last night.’ 

“ ‘ She has a husband, a father, and a brother ? ’ 

“ ‘ A brother.’ 

“ ‘ I do not address her brother ? ’ 

“He answered with great contempt, ‘No.’ 

“ ‘ She has some recent association with the number twelve ?’ 

“ The younger brother impatiently rejoined, ‘ With twelve o’clock V 

“ ‘ See, gentlemen,’ said I, still keeping my hands upon her 
breast, ‘ how useless I am, as you have brought me ! If I had 
known what I was- coming to see, I could have come provided. 
As it is, time must be lost. There are no medicines to be obtained 
in this lonely place.’ 

“The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, 
‘ There is a case of medicines here ; ’ and brought it from a closet, 
and put it on the table. * * * * 

“ I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and 23ut the stop- 
pers to my lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic 
medicines that were poisons in themselves, I would not have ad- 
ministered any of those. 

. “ ‘ Do you doubt them ? ’ asked the younger brother. 

“ ‘ You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,’ I replied, and 
said no more. 

“I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after 
many efforts, the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to 
repeat it after a while, and as it was necessary to watch its influ- 
ence, I then sat down by the side of the bed. There was a timid 
and suppressed woman in attendance (wife of the man down-stairs), 
who had retreated into a corner. The house was damp and de- 
cayed, indifferently furnished — evidently, recently occupied and 
temporarily used. Some thick old hangings had been nailed up 
before the windows, to deaden the sound of the shrieks. Tliey 
continued to be uttered in their regular succession, with the cry, 
‘ My husband, my father, and my brother ! ’ the counting up to 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


279 


twelve, and ‘ Hush ! ’ The frenzy was so violent, that I had not 
unfastened the bandages restraining the arms ; but, I had looked 
to them, to see that they were not painful. The only spark of 
encouragement in the case, was, that my hand upon the sufferer’s 
breast had this much soothing influence, that for minutes at a time 
it tranquillised the figure. It had no effect upon the cries ; no 
pendulum could be more regular. 

“For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had 
sat by the side of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers 
looking on, before the elder said : 

“ ‘ There is another patient.’ 

“ I was startled, and asked, ‘ Is it a pressing case ? ’ 

“‘You had better see,’ he carelessly answered; and took up a 
light. * * * * 

“ The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase, 
which was a species of loft over a s-table. There was a low plas- 
tered ceiling to a part of it ; the rest was open, to the ridge of the 
tiled roof, and there were beams across. Hay and straw were 
stored in that portion of the place, fagots for firing, and a heap of 
apples in sand. I had to pass through that part, to get at the 
other. My memory is circumstantial and unshaken. I try it 
with these details, and I see them all, in this my cell in the Bas- 
tille, near the close of the tenth year of my captivity, as I saw them 
all that night. 

“ On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his 
head, lay a handsome peasant boy — a boy of not more than seven- 
teen at the most. He lay on his back, with his teeth set, his 
right hand clenched on his breast, and his glaring eyes looking 
straight upward. I could not see where his wound was, as I 
kneeled on one knee over him ; but, I could see that he was dying 
of a wound from a sharp point. 

“ ‘ I am a doctor, my poor fellow,’ said I. Let me examine it.’ 

“ ‘ I do not want it examined,’ he answered ; ‘let it be.’ 

“ It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his 
hand away. The wound was a sword-thrust, received from twenty 
to twenty-four hours before, but no skill could have saved him if it 
had been looked to without delay. He was then dying fast. As I 
turned my eyes to the elder brother, I saw him looking down at this 
handsome boy whose life was ebbing out, as if he were a wounded 
bird, or hare, or rabbit ; not at all as if he were a fellow-creature. 

“ ‘ How has this been done, monsieur ? ’ said I. 

“‘A crazed young common dog ! A serf! Forced my brother 
to draw upon him, and has fallen by my brother’s sword — like a 
gentleman.’ 


280 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in 
this answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was in- 
convenient to have that different order of creature dying there, and 
that it would have been better if he had died in the usual obscure 
routine of his vermin kind. He was quite incapable of any com- 
passionate feeling about the boy, or about his fate. 

“ The boy’s eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, 
and they now slowly moved to me. 

“ ‘Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles ; but we common 
dogs are proud too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat 

us, kill us ; but we have a little pride left, sometimes. She 

have you seen her. Doctor ? ’ 

“ The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued 
by the distance. He referred to them, as if she were lying in our 
presence. 

“ I said, ‘ I have seen her.’ 

“ ‘ She is my sister. Doctor. They have had their shameful 
rights, these Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, 
many years, but we have had good girls among us. I know it, 
and have heard my father say so. She was a good girl. She was 
betrothed to a good young man, too : a tenant of his. We were all 
tenants of his — that man’s who stands there. The other is his 
brother, the worst of a bad race.’ 

“ It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily 
force to speak ; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis. 

“ ‘ We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we 
common dogs are by those superior Beings — taxed by him with- 
out mercy, obliged to work for him without pay, obliged to grind 
our corn at his mill, obliged to feed scores of his tame birds on our 
wretched crops, and forbidden for our lives to keep a single tame 
bird of our own, pillaged and plundered to that degree that when 
we chanced to have*a bit of meat, we ate it in fear, with the door 
barred and the shutters closed, that his people should not see it 
and take it from us — I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and 
were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing 
to bring a child into the world, and that what we should most 
pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable 
race die out ! ’ 

“ I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting 
forth like a fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the 
people somewhere ; but, I had never seen it break out, until I saw 
it in the dying boy. 

“ ‘ Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at 
that time, poor fellow, and she married her lover, that she might 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


281 


tend and comfort him in our cottage — our dog-hut, as that man 
would call it. She had not been married many weeks, when that 
man’s brother saw her and admired her, and asked that man to lend 
her to him — for what are husbands among us ! He was willing 
enough, but my sister was good and virtuous, and hated his brother 
with a hatred as strong as mine. What did the two then, to 
persuade 'her husband to use his influence with her, to make her 
willing ? ’ 

“The boy’s eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to 
the looker-on, and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true. 
The two opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see, 
even in this Bastille ; the gentleman’s, all negligent indifference ; 
the peasant’s, all trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge. 

“‘You know. Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these 
Nobles to harness us' common dogs to carts, and drive us. They 
so harnessed him and drove him. You know that it is among 
their Rights to keep us in their grounds all night, quieting the 
frogs, in order that their nqble sleep may not be disturbed. They 
kept him out in the unwholesome mists at night, and ordered him 
back into his harness in the day. But he was not persuaded. 
No ! Taken out of harness one day at noon, to feed — if he could 
find food — he sobbed twelve times, once for every stroke of the 
bell, and died on her bosom.’ 

“ Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his de- 
termination to tell all his wrong. He forced back the gathering 
shadows of death, as he forced his clenched right hand to remain 
clenched, and to cover his wound. 

“ ‘Then, with that man’s permission and even with his aid, his 
brother took her away ; in spite of what I know she must have 
told his brother — and what that is, will not be long unknown to 
you. Doctor, if it is now — his brother took her away — for his 
pleasure and diversion, for a little while. I saw her pass me on 
the road. When I took the tidings home, our father’s heart burst ; 
he never spoke one of the words that filled it. I took my young 
sister (for I have another) to a place beyond the reach of this man, 
and where, at least, she will never be his vassal. Then, I tracked 
the brother here, and last night climbed in — ^a common dog, but * 
sword in hand. — Where is the loft window ? It was somewhere 
here ? ’ " 

“ The room was darkening to his sight ; the world was narrow- 
ing around him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and 
straw were trampled over the floor, as if there had been a struggle. 

“ ‘ She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us 
till he was dead. He came in and first tossed me some pieces of 


282 


A TALE OE TWO CITIES. 


money ; then struck at me with a whip. But I, though a common 
dog, so struck at him as to make him draw. Let him break into as 
many pieces as he will, the sword that he stained with my common 
blood ; he drew to defend himself — thrust at me with all his skill 
for his life.’ 

“ My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the frag- 
ments of a broken sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was 
a gentleman’s. In another place, lay an old sword that seemed to 
have been a soldier’s. 

“ ‘ Now, lift me up. Doctor ; lift me up. Where is he ? ’ 

“ ‘ He is not here,’ I said, supporting the boy, and thinking 
that he referred to the brother. 

“ ‘ He ! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. 
Where is the man who was here 1 Turn my face to him.’ 

“ I did so, raising the boy’s head against my knee. But, in- 
vested for the moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself 
completely : obliging me to rise too, or I could not have still 
supported him. ^ 

“ ‘ Marquis,’ said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened 
wide, and his right hand raised, ‘ in the days when all these things 
are to be answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of 
your bad race, to answer for them. I mark this cross of blood 
upon you, as a sign that I do it. In the days when all these things 
are to' be answered for, I summon your brother, the worst of the 
bad race, to answer for them separately. I mark this cross of 
blood upon him, as a sign that I do it.’ 

“ Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with 
his forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant 
with the finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, 
and I laid him down dead. * * * 

“ When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found 
her raving in precisely the same order of continuity. I knew that 
this might last for many hours, and that it would probably end in 
the silence of the grave. 

“ I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side 
of the bed until the night was far advanced. She never abated 
* the piercing quality of her shrieks, never stumbled in the distinct- 
ness or the order of her words. They were always ‘ My husband, 
my father, and my brother ! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, 
eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Hush ! ’ 

“ This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. 
I had come and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she 
began to falter. I did what little could be done to assist that op- 
portunity, and by-and-bye she sank into a lethargy, and lay like the 
dead. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


283 


» 

“ It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long 
and fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to 
assist me to compose her figure and the dress she had torn. It 
was then that I knew her condition to be that of one in whom the 
first expectations of being a mother have arisen ; and it was then 
that I lost the little hope I had had of her. 

“‘Is she dead 1 ’ asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe 
as the elder brother, coming booted into the room from his horse. 

“‘Not dead,’ said I ; ‘ but like to die.’ 

“‘What strength there is in these common bodies!’ he said, 
looking down at her with some curiosity. 

“ ‘ There is prodigious strength,’ I answered him, ‘ in sorrow and 
despair.’ 

“ He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. 
He moved a chair with his foot near to mine, ordered the woman 
away, and said in a subdued voice, 

“ ‘ Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds, 
I recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation 
is high, and, as a young man with your fortune to make, you are 
probably mindful of your interest. The things that you see here, 
are things to be seen, and not spoken of.’ 

“ I listened to the patient’s breathing, and avoided answering. 

“ ‘ Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor ? ’ 

“‘Monsieur,’ said I, ‘in my profession, the communications of 
patients are always received in confidence.’ I was guarded in my 
answer, for I was troubled in my mind Avith what I had heard and 
seen. 

“Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried 
the pulse and the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking 
round as I resumed my seat, I found both the brothers intent upon 
me. * # * * 

“ I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so 
fearful of being detected and consigned to an underground cell and 
total darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no 
confusion or failure in my memory ; it can recall, and could detail, 
every word that was ever spoken between me and those brothers. 

“ She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand 
some few syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to 
her lips. She asked me where she was, and I told her ; who I 
was, and I told her. It was in vain that I asked her for her 
family name. She faintly shook her head upon the pillow, and 
kept her secret, as the boy had done. 

“I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had 
told the brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another 


284 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


day. Until then, though no one was ever presented to her con- 
sciousness save the woman and myself, one or other of them had 
always jealously sat behind the curtain at the head of the bed 
when I was there. But when it came to that, they seemed care- 
less what communication I might hold with her; as if — the 
thought passed through my mind — I were dying too. 

“ I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger 
brother’s (as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and 
that peasant a boy. The only consideration that appeared to affect 
the mind of either of them was the consideration that this was 
highly degrading to the family, and was ridiculous. As often as I 
caught the younger brother’s eyes, their expression reminded me 
that he disliked me deeply, for knowing what I knew from the 
boy. He was smoother and more polite to me than the elder ; 
but I saw this. I also saw that I was an incumbrance in the 
mind of the elder, too. 

“ My patient died, two hours before midnight — at a time, by 
my watch, answering almost to ’the minute when I had first seen 
her. I was alone with her, when her forlorn young head drooped 
gently on one side, and all her earthly wrongs and sorrows ended. 

“ The brothers were waiting in a room down-stairs, impatient to 
ride away. I had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their 
boots with their riding-whips, and loitering up and down. 

“ ‘ At last she is dead?’ said the elder, when I went in. 

“ ‘ She is dead,’ said I. 

“‘I congratulate you, my brother,’ were his words as he turned 
round. 

“ He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. 
He now gave me a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but 
laid it on the table. I had considered the question, and had re- 
solved to accept nothing. 

“ ‘ Pray excuse me,’ said I. ‘ Under the circumstances, no.’ 

“They exchanged looks, but bent their heads jto me as I bent 
mine to them, and we parted without another word on either 
side. * * * * 

“I am weary, weary, weary — worn down by misery. I cannot 
read what I have written with this gaunt hand. 

“ Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door 
in a little box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I 
had anxiously considered what I ought to do. I decided, that day, 
to write privately to the Minister, stating the nature of the two 
cases to which I had been summoned, and the place to which I. 
had gone ; in effect, stating all the circumstances. I knew what 
Court influence was, and what the immunities of the Nobles were, 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


285 


and I expected that the matter would never he heard of ; but, I 
wished to relieve my own mind. I had kept the matter a pro- 
found secret, even from my wife ; and this, too, I resolved to state 
in my letter. I had no apprehension whatever of my real danger ; 
but I was conscious that there might be danger for others, if others 
were compromised by possessing the knowledge that I possessed. 

“ I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my 
letter that night. I rose long before my. usual time next morning 
to finish it. It was the last day of the year. The letter was 
lying before me just completed, when I was told that a lady 
waited, who wished to see me. * * * * 

“ I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set 
myself. It is so cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and 
the gloom upon me is so dreadful. 

“ The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked 
for long life. She was in great agitation. She presented herself 
to me as the wife of the Marquis St. Evr^monde. I connected 
the title by which the boy had addressed the elder brother, with 
the initial letter embroidered on the scarf, and had no difficulty 
in arriving at the conclusion that I had seen that nobleman very 
lately. 

“ My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of 
our conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than 
I was, and I know not at what times I may be watched. She 
had in part suspected, and in part discovered, the main facts of 
the cruel story, of her husband’s share in it, and my being resorted 
to. She did not know that the girl was dead. Her hope had been, 
she said in great distress, to show her, in secret, a woman’s sym- 
pathy. Her hope had been to avert the wrath of Heaven from a 
House that had long been hateful to th|^ suffering many. 

“ She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister liv- 
ing, and her greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell 
her nothing but that there was such a sister ; beyond that, I knew 
nothing. Her inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, 
had been the hope that I could tell her the name and place of abode. 
Whereas, to this wretched hour I am ignorant of both. * * * * 

“ These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with 
a warning, yesterday. I must finish my record to-day. 

“ She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her mar- 
riage. How could she be ! The brother distrusted and disliked her, 
and his influence was all opposed to her ; she stood in dread of him, 
and in dread of her husband too. When I handed her down to 
the door, there was a child, a pretty boy from two to three years 
old, in her carriage. 


28G 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ ‘ For his sake, Doctor,’ she said, pointing to him in tears, ‘ I 
would do all I can to make what poor amends I can. He will 
never prosper in his inheritance otherwise. I have a presentiment 
that if no other innocent atonement is made for this, it will one 
day be required of him. What I have left to call my own — 
it is little beyond the worth of a few jewels — I will make it the 
first charge of his life to bestow, with the compassion and lament- 
ing of his dead mother, on this injured family, if the sister can be 
discovered.’ 

“ She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, ‘ It is for thine 
own dear sake. Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles ? ’ The child 
answered her bravely, ‘ Yes ! ’ I kissed her hand, and she took him 
in her arms, and went away caressing him. I never saw her more. 

“As she had mentioned her husband’s name in the faith that I 
knew it, I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my ktter, 
and, not trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that 
day. 

“ That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o’clock, a 
man in a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and 
softly followed my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs. 
When my servant came into the room where I sat with my v/ife 

— 0 my wife, beloved of my heart ! My fair young English wife ! 

— we saw the man, who was supposed to be at the gate, standing 
silent behind him. 

“ An urgent case in the Rue St. Honord, he said. It would not 
detain me, he had a coach in waiting. 

“ It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was 
clear of the house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth 
from behind, and my arms were pinioned. The two brothers crossed 
the road from a dark corner, and identified me with a single gest- 
ure. The Marquis took from his pocket the letter I had written, 
showed it me, burnt it in the light of a lantern that was held, 
and extinguished the ashes with his foot. Not a word was spoken. 
I was brought here, I was brought to my living grave. 

“If it had pleased God to put it in the hard heart of either of 
the brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings 
of my dearest wife — so much as to let me know by a word 
whether alive or dead — I might have thought that He had not 
quite abandoned them. But, now I believe that the mark of the 
red cross is fatal to them, and that they have no part in His mercies. 
And them and their descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alex- 
andre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, 
in my unbearable agony, denounce to the times when all these things 
shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven and to earth.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


287 


A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was 
done. A sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articu- 
late in it but blood. The narrative called up the most revengeful 
passions of the time, and there was not a head in the nation but 
must have dropped before it. 

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to 
show how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the 
other captured Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept 
it, biding their time. Little need to show that this detested family 
name had long been anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was 
wrought into the fatal register. The man never trod ground whose 
virtues and services would have sustained him in that place that 
day, against such denunciation. 

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was 
a well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife. 
One of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations 
of the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices 
and self-immolations on the people’s altar. Therefore when the 
President said (else had his own head quivered on his shoulders), 
that the good physician of the Republic would deserve better still 
of the Republic by rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, 
and would doubtless feel a sacred glow and joy in making his 
daughter a widow and her child an orphan, there was wild excite- 
ment, patriotic fervour, not a touch of human sympathy. 

“Much influence around him, has that Doctor?” murmured 
Madame Defarge, smiling to The Vengeance. “ Save him now, my 
Doctor, save him ! ” 

At every juryman’s vote, there was a roar. Another and another. 
Roar and roar. 

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an 
enemy of the Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back 
to the Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty hours I 


CHAPTER XL 

. DUSK. 

The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell 
under the sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, 
she uttered no sound; and so strong was the voice within her, 
representing that it was she of all the world who must uphold him 
in his misery and not augment it, that it quickly raised her, even 
from that shock. 


288 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out 
of doors, the tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement 
of the court’s emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, 
when Lucie stood stretching out her arms towards her husband, 
with nothing in her face but love and consolation. 

“ If I might touch him ! If I might embrace him once ! 0, 

good citizens, if you would have so much compassion for us ! ” 

There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who 
had taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured 
out to the show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, “ Let 
her embrace 'him then; it is but a moment.” It was silently ac- 
quiesced in, and they passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised 
place, where he, by leaning over the dock, could fold her in his 
arms. 

“ Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on 
my love. We shall meet again, where the weary are at rest ! ” 

They were her husband’s words, as he held her to his bosom. 

“ I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above : 
don’t suffer for me. A parting blessing for our child.” 

“ I send it to her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to 
her by you.” 

“ My husband. No ! A moment ! ” He was tearing himself 
apart from her. “We shall not be separated long. I feel that | 
this will break my heart by-and-bye ; but I will do my duty while I li 
can, and when I leave her, God will raise up friends for her, as He ij 
did far me.” I 

Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees 
to both of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, 
crying : 

“No, no ! What have you done, what have you done, that you 
should kneel to us ! We know now, what a struggle you made of 
old. We know, now what you underwent when you suspected my 
descent, and when you knew it. We know now, the natural antip- 
athy you strove against, and conquered, for her dear sake. We 
thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and duty. Heaven 
be with you ! ” 

Her father’s only answer was to draw his hands through his 
white hair, and wring them with a shriek of anguish. 

“ It could not be otherwise,” said the prisoner. “ All things 
have worked together as they have fallen out. It was the always- 
vain endeavour to discharge my poor mother’s trust that first 
brought my fatal presence near you. Good could never come of 
such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a begin- 
ning. Be comforted, and forgive me. Heaven bless you ! ” 


1 



AFTER THE SENTENCE. 








290 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


As he was draAvn away, his wife released him, and stood looking 
after him with her hands touching one another in the attitude of 
prayer, and with a radiant look upon her face, in which there was 
even a comforting smile. As he went out at the prisoners’ door, 
she turned, laid her head lovingly on her father’s breast, tried to 
speak to him, and fell at his feet. 

Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never 
moved, Sydney Carton came and took her up. Only her father 
and Mr. Lorry were with her. His arm trembled as it raised her, 
and supported her head. Yet, there was an air about him that 
was not all of pity — that had a flush of pride in it. 

“ Shall I take her to a coach ? I shall never feel her weight.” 

He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in 
a coach. Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took 
his seat beside the driver. 

When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the 
dark not many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the 
•rough stones of the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, 
and carried her up the staircase to their rooms. There, he laid her 
down on a couch, where her child and Miss Pross wept over her. 

“Don’t recall her to herself,” he said, softly, to the latter, “she 
is better so. Don’t revive her to consciousness, while she only faints.” 

“ Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton ! ” cried little Lucie, springing 
up and throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of 
grief. “ Now that you have come, I think you will do something to 
help mamma, something to save papa ! 0, look at her, dear Carton ! 
Can you, of all the people who love her, bear to see her so ? ” 

He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his 
face. He put her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious 
mother. 

“ Before I go,” he said, and paused — “I may kiss her ? ” 

It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and 
touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The 
child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her 
grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard 
him say, “A life you love.” 

When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on 
Mr. Lorry and her father, who were following, and said to the latter : 

“ You had great influence but yesterday. Doctor Manette ; let it 
at least be tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very 
friendly to you, and veiy recognisant of your services ; are they not ? ’’ 

“ Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I 
had the strongest assurances that I should save him ; and I did.” 
He returned the answer in great trouble, and very slowly. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


291 


“ Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow after- 
noon are few and short, but try.” 

“ I intend to try. I will not rest a moment.” 

“ That’s well. I have known such energy as yours do great 
things before now — though never,” he added, with a smile and 
a sigh together, “ such great things as this. But try ! Of little 
worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It 
would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.” 

“ I will go,” said Doctor Manette, “ to the Prosecutor and the 
President straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to 

name. I will write too, and But stay ! There is a celebration 

in the streets, and no one will be accessible until dark.” 

“ That’s true. Well ! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not 
much the forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to 
know how you speed ; though, mind ! I expect nothing ! When 
are you likely to have seen these dread powers. Doctor Manette ? ” 

“ Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or 
two from this.” 

“It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or 
two. If I go to Mr. Lorry’s at nine, shall I hear what you have 
done, either from our friend, or from yourself?” 

“Yes.” 

“ May you prosper ! ” 

Mr. Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him 
on the shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn. 

“I have no hope,” said Mr. Lorry, in a low and sorrowful 
whisper. 

“Nor have I.” 

“ If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to 
spare him — which is a large supposition ; for what is his life, or 
any man’s to them ! — I doubt if they durst spare him after the 
demonstration in the court.” 

“And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound.” 

Mr. Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face 
upon it. 

“Don’t despond,” said Carton, very gently; “don’t grieve. I 
encouraged Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might 
one day be consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think ‘ his 
life was wantonly thrown away or wasted,’ and that might trouble 
her.” 

“Yes, yes, yes,” returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, “you are 
right. But he will perish ; there is no real hope.” 

“Yes. He will perish : there is no real hope,” echoed Carton. 
And walked with a settled step, down-stairs. 


292 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


CHAPTER XII. 

DAEKNESS. 

Sydney Caeton paused in the street, not quite decided where 
to go. “At Tellson’s banking-house at nine,” he said, with a 
musing face. “Shall I do well, in the mean time, to show myself? 
I think so. It is best that these people should know there is 
such a man as I here; it is a sound precaution, and may be a 
necessary preparation. But care, care, care ! Let me think it 
out ! ” 

Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, 
he took a turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced 
the thought in his mind to its possible consequences. His first 
impression was confirmed. “It is best,” he said, finally resolved, 
“that these people should know there is such a man as I here.” 
And he turned his face towards Saint Antoine. 

Defarge had described himself, 'that day, as the keeper of a 
wine-shop in the Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for 
one who knew the city well, to find his house without asking any 
question. Having ascertained its situation. Carton came out of 
those closer streets again, and dined at a place of refreshment and 
fell sound asleep after dinner. For the first time in many years, 
he had no strong drink. Since last night he had taken nothing 
but a little light thin wine, and last night he had dropped the 
brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry’s hearth like a man who had 
done with it. 

It was as late as seven o’clock when he awoke refreshed, and 
went out into the streets again. As he passed along towards Saint 
Antoine, he stopped at a shop-window where there was a mirror, 
and slightly altered the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, 
and his coat-collar, and his wild hair. This done, he went on 
direct to Defarge’s, and went in. 

There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques 
Three, of the restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man, 
whom he had seen upon the Jury, stood drinking at the little 
counter, in conversation with the Defarges, man and wife. The 
Vengeance assisted in the conversation, like a regular member of 
the establishment. 

As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifl'erent 
French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a care- 
less glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then 
advanced to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered. 

He repeated what he had already said. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


293 


“ English 1 ” asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her 
dark eyebrows. 

After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French 
word were slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former 
strong foreign accent. “ Yes, madame, yes. I am English ! ” 

Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, 
as he took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puz- 
zling out its meaning, he heard her say, “I swear to you, like 
Evr^monde ! ” 

Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening. 

“How?” 

“ Good evening.” 

“Oh! Good evening, citizen,” filling his glass. “Ah! and 
good wine. I drink to the Republic.” 

Defarge went back to the counter, and said, “ Certainly, a little 
like.” Madame sternly retorted, “I tell you a good deal like.” 
Jacques Three pacifically remarked, “He is so much in your mind, 
see you, madame.” The amiable Vengeance added, with a laugh, 
“Yes, my faith! And you are looking forward with so much 
pleasure to seeing him once more to-morrow ! ” 

Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow 
forefinger, and with a studious and absorbed face. They were all 
leaning their arms on the counter close together, speaking low. 
After a silence of a few moments, during which they all looked 
towards him without disturbing his outward attention from the 
Jacobin editor, they resumed their conversation. 

“ It is true what madame says,” observed Jacques Three. “ Why 
stop ? There is great force in that. Why stop ? ” 

“Well, well,” reasoned Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. 
After all, the question is still where ? ” 

“At extermination,” said madame. ' 

“Magnificent!” croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, 
highly approved. 

“Extermination is good doctrine, my wife,” said Defarge, rather 
troubled ; “in general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor 
has suffered much ; you have seen him to-day ; you have observed 
his face when the paper was read.” 

“ I have observed his face ! ” repeated madame, contemptuously 
and angrily. “ Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed 
his face to be not the face of a true friend of the Republic. Let 
him take care of his face ! ” 

“ And you have observed, my wife,” said Defarge, in a depreca- 
tory manner, “ the anguish of his daughter, which must be a dread- 
ful anguish to him ! ” 


294 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“I have observed his daughter,” repeated madame j “yes, I 
have observed his daughter, more times than one. I have observed 
her to-day, and I have observed her other days. I have observed 
her in the court, and I have observed her in the street by the 

prison. Let me but lift my finger ! ” She seemed to raise 

it (the listener’s eyes were always on his paper), and to let it fall 
with a rattle on the ledge before her, as if the axe had dropped. 

“ The citizeness is superb ! ” croaked the Juryman. 

“ She is an Angel ! ” said The Vengeance, and embraced her. 

“As to thee,” pursued madame, implacably, addressing her 
husband, “if it depended on thee — which, happily, it does not — 
thou wouldst rescue this man even now.” 

“ No ! ” protested Defarge. “ Not if to lift this glass would do 
it ! But I would leave the matter there. I say, stop there.” 

“ See you then, Jacques,” said Madame Defarge, wrathfully ; 
“and see you, too, my little Vengeance; see you both ! Listen ! 
For other crimes as tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long 
time on my register, doomed to destruction and extermination. 
Ask my husband, is that so.” 

“ It is so,” assented Defarge, without being asked. 

“In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, 
he finds this paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the 
middle of the night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, 
here on this spot, by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so.” 

“ It is so,” assented Defarge. 

“ That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and 
the lamp is burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those 
shutters and between those iron bars, that I have now a secret to 
communicate. Ask him, is that so.” 

“ It is so,” assented Defarge again. 

“ I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with 
these two hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, ‘ Defarge, I was 
brought up among the fishermen of the sea-shore, and. that peasant 
family so injured by the two Evr^monde brothers, as that Bastille 
paper describes, is my family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally 
wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was 
my sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that brother 
was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead, 
and that summons to answer for those things descends to me ! ’ 
Ask him, is that so.” 

“ It is so,” assented Defarge once more. 

“ Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” returned madame ; 
“ but don’t tell me.” 

Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly 


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295 


nature of her wrath — the listener could feel how white she was, 
without seeing her — and both highly commended it. Defarge, a 
weak minority, interposed a few words for the memoiy of the com- 
passionate wife of the Marquis ; but only elicited from his own 
wife a repetition of her last reply. “ Tell the Wind and the Fire 
where to stop ; not me ! ” 

Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English 
customer paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, 
and asked, as a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace. 
Madame Defarge took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in 
pointing out the road. The English customer was not without 
his reflections then, that it might be a good deed to seize that arm, 
lift it, and strike under it sharp and deep. 

But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow 
of the prison wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to 
present himself in Mr. Lorry’s room again, where he found the old 
gentleman walking to and fro in restless anxiety. He said he had 
been with Lucie until just now, and had only left her for a few 
minutes, to come and keep his appointment. Her father had not 
been seen, since he quitted the banking-house towards four o’clock. 
She had some faint hopes that his mediation might save Charles, 
but they were very slight. He had been more than five hours 
gone : where could he be ? 

Mr. Lorry waited until ten; but. Doctor Manette not returning, 
and he being unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged 
that he should go back to her, and come to the banking-house 
again at midnight. In the meanwhile. Carton would wait alone 
by the fire for the Doctor. 

He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve ; but Doctor 
Manette did not come back. Mr. Lorry returned, and found no 
tidings of him, and brought none. Where could he be 

They were discussing this question, and were almost building up 
some weak structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they 
heard him on the stairs. The instant he entered the room, it was 
plain that all was lost. 

Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been 
all that time traversing the streets, was never known. As he 
stood staving at them, they asked him no question, for his face told 
them everything. 

“ I cannot find it,’! said he, “ and I must have it. Where is it ? ” 

His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless 
look straying all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on 
the floor. 

“ Where is my bench ? I have been looking everywhere for my 


296 


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bench, and I can’t find it. What have they done with my work 
Time presses : I must finish those shoes.” 

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them. 

“ Come, come I ” said he, in a whimpering miserable way ; “let 
me get to work. Give me my work.” 

Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon 
the ground, like a distracted child. 

“ Don’t torture a poor forlorn wretch,” he implored them, with 
a dreadful cry ; “ but give me my work ! What is to become of us, 
if those shoes are not done to-night ? ” 

Lost, utterly lost ! 

It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore 
him, — that — as if by agreement — they each put a hand upon 
his shoulder, and soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a 
promise that he should have his work presently. He sank into the 
chair, and brooded over the embers, and shed tears. As if all that 
had happened since the garret time were a momentary fancy, or 
a dream, Mr. Lorry saw him shrink into the exact figure that 
Defarge had had in keeping. 

Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this 
spectacle of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions. His 
lonely daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed to 
them both too strongly. Again, as if by agreement, they looked at 
one another with one meaning in their faces. Carton was the first 
to speak : 

“ The last chance is gone : it was not much. Yes ; he had bet- 
ter be taken to her. But, before you go, will you, for a moment, 
steadily attend to me 1 Don’t ask me why I make the stipulations 
I am going to make, and exact the promise I am going to exact ; I 
have a reason — a good one.” 

“ I do not doubt it,” answered Mr. Lorry. “ Say on.” 

The figure in the chair between them, was all the time monot- 
onously rocking itself to and fro, and moaning. They spoke in 
such a tone as they would have used if they had been watching by 
a sick-bed in the night. 

Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling 
his feet. As he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was ac- 
customed to carry the lists of his day’s duties, fell lightly on the 
floor. Carton took it up, and there was a folded paper in it. 
“We should look at this!” he said. Mr. Lorry nodded his con- 
sent. He opened it, and exclaimed, “ Thank God I ” 

“What is it?” asked Mr. Lorry, eagerly. 

“ A moment ! Let me speak of it in its place. First,” he put 
his hand in his coat, and took another paper from it, “ that is the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


297 


certificate which enables me to pass out of this city. Look at it. 
You see — Sydney Carton, an Englishman ? ” 

Mr. Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face. 

“ Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow, 
you remember, and I had better not take it into the prison.” 

“Why not?” 

“ I don’t know ; I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper 
that Doctor Manette has carried about him. It is a similar certifi- 
cate, enabling him and his daughter and her child, at any time, to 
pass the barrier and the frontier ! You see ? ” 

“ Yes ! 

“ Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against 
evil, yesterday. AYhen is it dated ? But no matter ; don’t stay 
to look; put it up carefully with mine and your own. Now, 
observe ! I never doubted until within this hour or two, that he 
had, or could have such a paper. It is good, until recalled. But 
it may be soon recalled, and, I have reason to think, will be.” 

“ They are not in danger ? ” 

“ They are in great danger. They are in danger of denuncia- 
tion by Madame Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have 
overheard words of that woman’s, to-night, which have presented 
their danger to me in strong colours. I have lost no time, and 
since then, I have seen the spy. He confirms me. He knows 
that a wood-sawyer, living by the prison-wall, is under the control 
of the Defarges, and has been rehearsed by Madame Defarge as to 
his having seen Her” — he never mentioned Lucie’s name — 
“making signs and signals to prisoners. It is easy to foresee that 
the pretence will be the common one, a prison plot, and that it 
will involve her life — and perhaps her child’s — and perhaps her 
father’s — for both have been seen with her at that place. Don’t 
look so horrified. You will save them all.” 

“ Heaven grant I may. Carton ! But how ? ” 

“ I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it 
could depend on no better man. This new denunciation will cer- 
tainly not take place until after to-morrow; probably not until 
two or three days afterwards ; more probably a week afterwards. 
You know it is a capital crime, to mourn for, or sympathise with, 
a victim of the Guillotine. She and her father would unquestion- 
ably be guilty of this crime, and this woman (the inveteracy of 
whose pursuit cannot be described) would wait to add that strength 
to her case, and make herself doubly sure. You follow me ? ” 

“ So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, 
that for the moment I lose sight,” touching the back of the Doctor’s 
chair, “ even of this distress.” 


298 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the 
sea-coast as quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations 
have been completed for some days, to return to England. Early 
to-morrow have your horses ready, so that they may be in starting 
trim at two o’clock in the afternoon.” 

“ It shall be done ! ” 

His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr. Lorry caught 
the flame, and was as quick as youth. 

“You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no 
better man ? Tell her, to-night, what you know of her danger as 
involving her child and her father. Dwell upon that, for she would 
lay her own fair head beside her husband’s cheerfully.” He fal- 
tered for an instant ; then went on as before. “For the sake of 
her child and her father, press upon her, the necessity of leaving 
Paris, with them and you, at that hour. Tell her that it was her 
husband’s last arrangement. Tell her that more depends upon it 
than she dare believe, or hope. You think that her father, even 
in this sad state, will submit himself to her ; do you not ? ” 

“ I am sure of it.” 

“I thought so. Quietly and steadily have all these arrange- 
ments made in the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own 
seat in the' carriage. The moment I come to you, take me in, and 
drive away.” 

“ I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances ? ” 

“You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, 
and will reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place 
occupied, and then for England ! ” 

“ Why, then,” said Mr. Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm 
and steady hand, “it does not all depend on one old man, but I 
shall have a young and ardent man at my side.” 

“ By the help of Heaven you shall ! Promise me solemnly that 
nothing will influence you to alter the course on' which we now 
stand pledged to one another.” 

“ Nothing, Carton.” 

“ Remember these words to-morrow : change the course, or de- 
lay in it — for any reason — and no life can possibly be saved, and 
many lives must inevitably be sacrificed.” 

“ I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully.” 

“ And I hope to do mine. Now, good bye ! ” 

Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though 
he even put the old man’s hand to his lips, he did not part from 
him then. He helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before 
the dying embers, as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to 
tempt it forth to find where the bench and work were hidden that 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


299 


it still moaningly besought to have. He walked on the other side 
of it and protected it to the courtyard of the house where the af- 
flicted heart — so happy in the memorable time when he had re- 
vealed his own desolate heart to it — outwatched the awful night. 
He entered the courtyard and remained there for a few moments 
alone, looking up at the light in the window of her room. Before 
he went away, he breathed a blessing towards it, and a Farewell. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

FIFTY-TWO. 

In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day 
awaited their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. 
Fifty-two w^ere to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to 
the boundless everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them, 
new occupants were appointed ; before their blood ran into the 
blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle with theirs 
to-morrow was already set apart. 

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general 
of seventy, whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress 
of twenty, whose poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physi- 
cal diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize 
on victims of all degrees ; and the frightful moral disorder, born 
of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indif- 
ference, smote equally without distinction. 

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no 
flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every 
iine of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his condemnation. 
He had fully comprehended that no personal influence could pos- 
sibly save him, that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, 
and that units could avail him nothing. 

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife 
fresh before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His 
hold on life was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen ; by 
gradual efforts and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the 
tighter there ; and when he brought his strength to bear on that 
hand and it yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, 
too, in all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his 
heart, that contended against resignation. If, for a moment, he 
did feel resigned, then his wife and child who had to live after 
him, seemed to protest and to make it a selfish thing. 

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that 


300 


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there was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers 
went the same road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, 
sprang up to stimulate him. Next followed the thought that 
much of the future peace of mind enjoyable by the dear ones, 
depended on his quiet fortitude. So, by degrees he calmed into 
the better state, when he could raise his thoughts much higher, 
and draw comfort down. 

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he 
had travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase 
the means of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such 
time as the prison lamps should be extinguished. 

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known 
nothing of her father’s imprisonment, until he had heard of it from 
herself, and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father’s and 
uncle’s responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been 
read. He had already explained to her that his concealment from 
herself of the name he had relinquished, was the one condition — 
fully intelligible now — that her father had attached to their 
betrothal, and was the one promise he had still exacted on the 
morning of their marriage. He entreated her, for her father’s 
sake, never to seek to know whether her father had become ob- 
livious of the existence of the paper, or had had it recalled to him 
(for the moment, or for good), by the story of the Tower, on that 
old Sunday under the dear old plane-tree in the garden. If he had 
preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt 
that he had supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had 
found no mention of it among the relics of prisoners which the 
populace had discovered there, and which had been described to 
all the world. He besought her — though he added that he knew 
it was needless — to console her father, by' impressing him through 
every tender means she could think of, with the truth that he had 
done nothing for which he could justly reproach himself, but had 
uniformly forgotten himself for their joint sakes. Next to her 
preservation of his own last grateful love and blessing, and her 
overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their dear child, he 
adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her father. 

To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he 
told her father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his 
care. And he told him this, very -strongly, with the hope of rous- 
ing him from any despondency or dangerous retrospect towards 
which he foresaw he might be tending. 

To 'Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his 
worldly affairs. That done, with many added sentences of grateful 
friendship and warm attachment, all was done. He never thought 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


301 


of Carton. His mind was so full of the others, that he never once 
thought of him. 

He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put 
out. When he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done 
with this world. 

But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in 
shining forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho 
(though it had nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably 
released and light of heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told 
him it was all a dream, and he had never gone away. A pause of 
forgetfulness, and then he had even suffered, and had come back 
to her, dead and at peace, and yet there was no difference in him. 
Another pause of oblivion, and he awoke in the sombre morning, 
unconscious where he was or what had happened, until it flashed 
upon his mind, “ this is the day of my death ! ” 

Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the 
fifty-two heads were to fall. And now, while he was composed, 
and hoped that he could meet the end with quiet heroism, a new 
action began in his waking thoughts, which was very difficult to 
master. 

He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his 
life. How high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, 
where he would be stood, how he would be touched, whether the 
touching hands would be dyed red, which way his face would be 
turned, whether he would be the first, or might be the last : these 
and many similar questions, in nowise directed by his will, ob- 
truded themselves over and over again, countless times. Neither 
were they connected with fear : he was conscious of no fear. 
Rather, they originated in a strange besetting desire to know what 
to do when the time came ; a desire gigantically disproportionate 
to the few swift moments to which it referred ; a wondering that 
was more like the wondering of some other spirit within his, than 
his own. 

The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks 
struck the numbers he would never hear again. Nine gone for 
ever, ten gone for ever, eleven gone for ever, twelve coming on to 
pass away. After a hard contest with that eccentric action of 
thought which had last perplexed him, he had got tlie better of it. 
He walked up and down, softly repeating their names to himself. 
The worst of the strife was over. He could walk up and down, 
free from distracting fancies, praying for himself and for them. 

Twelve gone for ever. 

He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew 
he would be summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils 


302 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


jolted heavily and slowly through the streets. Therefore, he re- 
solved to keep Two before his mind, as the hour, and so to strengthen 
himself in the interval that he might be able, after that time, to 
strengthen others. 

Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast, 
a very different liian from the prisoner, who had walked to and 
fro at La Force, he heard One struck away from him, without 
surprise. The hour had measured like most other hours. Devoutly 
thankful to Heaven for his recovered self-possession, he thought, 
“ There is but another now,” and turned to walk again. 

Footsteps in the stone passage outside the door. He stopped. 

The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was 
opened, or as it opened, a man said in a low voice, in English : 
“ He has never seen me here ; I have kept out of his w^ay. Go 
you in alone ; I wait near. Lose no time ! ” 

The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before 
him face to face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a 
smile on his features, and a cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney 
Carton. 

There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, 
for the first moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an appari- 
tion of his own imagining. But, he spoke, and it was his voice ; 
he took the prisoner’s hand, and it was his real grasp. 

“ Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me ? ” 
he said. 

“ I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now. 
You are not ” — the apprehension came suddenly into his mind — 
“ a prisoner ? ” 

“No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the 
keepers here, and in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from 
her — your wife, dear Darnay.” 

The prisoner wrung his hand. 

“ I bring you a request from her.” 

“What is it?” 

“ A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to 
you in the most pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that 
you well remember.” 

The prisoner turned his face partly aside. 

“You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means ; 
I have no time to tell you. You must comply with it — take off 
those boots you wear, and draw on these of mine.” 

There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the pris- 
oner. Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of 
lightning, got him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


303 


“ Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them ; put 
your will to them. Quick ! ” 

“ Carton, there is no escaping from this place ; it never can be 
done. You will only die with me. It is madness.” 

“It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I^ 
When I ask you to pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and 
remain here. Change that cravat for this of mine, that coat for 
this of mine. While you do it, let me take this ribbon from your 
hair, and shake out your hair like this of mine ! ” 

With wonderful quickness, and with a strength both of will and 
action, that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes 
upon him. The prisoner was like a young child in his hands. 

“ Carton ! Dear Carton ! It is madness. It cannot be accom- 
plished, it never can be done, it has been attempted, and has always 
failed. I implore you not to add your death to the bitterness of 
mine.” 

“ Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door ? When I 
ask that, refuse. There are pen and ink and paper on this table. 
Is your hand steady enough to write ? ” 

“ It was when you came in.” 

“Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, 
friend, quick ! ” 

Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at 
the table. Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close 
beside him. 

“Write exactly as I speak.” 

“ To whom do I address it ? ” " 

“ To no one.” Carton still had his hand in his breast. 

“ Do I date it ? ” 

“ No.” 

The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing 
over him with his hand in his breast, looked down. 

“ ‘ If you remember,’ ” said Carton, dictating, “ ‘ the words that 
passed between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this 
when you see it. You do remember them, I know. It is not in 
your nature to forget them.’ ” 

He was drawing his hand from his breast ; the prisoner chanc- 
ing to look up in his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, 
closing upon something. 

“ Have you written ‘ forget them ’ ? ” Carton asked. 

“ I have. Is that a weapon in your hand ? ” 

“ No ; I am not armed.” 

“ What is it in your hand ? ” 

“You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few 


304 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


words more.” He dictated again. “ ‘ I am thankful that the 
time has come, when I can prove them. That I do so is no sub- 
ject for regret or grief.’ ” As he said these words with his eyes 
fixed on the writer, his hand slowly and softly moved down close 
to the writer’s face. 

The pen dropped from Darnay’s fingers on the table, and he 
looked about him vacantly. 

“ What vapour is that ? ” he asked. 

“Vapour?” 

“ Something that crossed me ? ” 

“ I am conscious of nothing ; there can be nothing here. Take 
up the pen and finish. Hurry, hurry ! ” 

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the 
prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at 
Carton with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing, 
Carton — his hand again in his breast — looked steadily at him. 

“ Hurry, hurry ! ” 

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more. 

“ ‘ If it had been otherwise ; ’ ” Carton’s hand was again watch- 
fully and softly stealing down ; “ ‘ I never should have used the 
longer opportunity. , If it had been otherwise ; ’ ” the hand was at 
the prisoner’s face ; ‘‘ ‘ I should but have had so much the more to 

answer for. If it had been otherwise ’ ” Carton looked at 

the pen and saw it was trailing off into unintelligible signs. 

Carton’s hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner 
sprang up with a reproachful look, but Carton’s hand was close 
and firm at his nostrils, and Carton’s left arm caught him round 
the waist. For a few seconds he faintly struggled with the man 
who had come to lay down his life for him ; but, within a minute 
or so, he was stretched insensible on the ground. 

Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was. 
Carton dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside, 
combed back his hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had 
worn. Then, he softly called, “ Enter there ! Come in ! ” and 
the Spy presented himself. 

“You see?” said Carton, looking up, as he kneeled on one knee 
beside the insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: “is 
your hazard very great ? ” 

“ Mr. Carton,” the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fin- 
gers, “my hazard is not that, in the thick of business here, if 
you are true to the whole of your bargain.” 

“Don’t fear me. I will be true to the death.” 

“You must be, Mr. Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right. 
Being made right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


305 


“ Have no fear ! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, 
and the rest will soon be far from here, please God ! Now, get 
assistance and take me to the coach.” 

“ You said the Spy nervously. 

“Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the 
gate by which you brought me in ? ” 

“ Of course.” 

“I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am 
fainter now you take me out. The parting interview has over- 
powered me. Such a thing has happened here, often, and too 
often. Your life is in your own hands. Quick ! Call assistance ! ” 

“You swear not to betray me?” said the trembling Spy, as he 
paused for a last moment. 

“ Man, man ! ” returned Carton, stamping his foot ; “ have I 
sworn by no solemn vow already, to go through with this, that 
you waste the precious moments now ? Take him yourself to the 
courtyard you know of, place him yourself in the carriage, show 
him yourself to Mr. Lorry, tell him yourself to give him no restora- 
tive but air, and to remember my words of last night, and his 
promise of last night, and drive away ! ” 

The Spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, rest- 
ing his forehead on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, 
with two men. 

“ How, then ? ” said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. 
“So afflicted to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the 
lottery of Sainte Guillotine ? ” 

“A good patriot,” said the other, “could hardly have been more 
afflicted if the Aristocrat had drawn a blank.” 

They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had 
brought to the door, and bent to carry it away. 

“The time is short, Evrdmonde,” said the Spy, in a warning 
voice. 

“ I know it well,” answered Carton. “ Be careful of my friend, 
I entreat you, and leave me.” 

“Come, then, my children,” said Barsad. “Lift him, and come 
away ! ” 

The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his pow- 
ers of listening to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might 
denote suspicion or alarm. There was none. Keys turned, doors 
clashed, footsteps passed along distant passages : no cry was raised, 
or hurry made, that seemed unusual. Breathing more freely in a 
little while, he sat down at the table, and listened again until the 
clock struck Two. 

Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning. 


X 


306 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


then began to be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, 
and finally his own. A gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in, 
merely saying, “ Follow me, Evr^monde ! ” and he followed into a 
large dark room, at a distance. It was a dark winter day, and 
what with the shadows within, and what with the shadows with- 
out, he could but dimly discern the others who were brought there 
to have their arms bound. Some were standing ; some seated. 
Some were lamenting, and in restless motion ; but, these were few. 
The great majority were silent and still, looking fixedly at the 
ground. 

As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty- 
two were brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to em- 
brace him, as having a knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a 
great dread of discovery ; but the man went on. A very few mo- 
ments after that, a young woman, with a slight girlish form, a 
sweet spare face in which there was no vestige of colour, and large 
widely opened patient eyes, rose from the seat where he had observed 
her sitting, and came to speak to him. 

“ Citizen Evrdmonde,” she said, touching him with her cold 
hand. “ I am a poor little seamstress, who was with you in La 
Force.” 

He murmured for answer : “ True. I forget what you were 
accused of? ” 

“ Plots. Though the just Heaven knows that I am innocent of 
any. Is it likely ? Who would think of plotting with a poor little 
weak creature like me ? ” 

The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him, that 
tears started from his eyes. 

“ I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evrdmonde, but I have done 
nothing. I am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do 
so much good to us poor, will profit by my death ; but I do not 
know how that can be. Citizen Evrdmonde. Such a poor weak 
little creature ! ” 

As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften 
to, it warmed and softened to this pitiable girl. 

“ I heard you were released. Citizen Evrdmonde. I hoped it was 
true V . 

“ It was. But, I was again taken and condemned.” 

“ If I may ride with you, Citizen Evrdmonde, will you let me 
hold your hand ? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and 
it will give me more courage.” 

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden 
doubt in them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, 
hunger-worn young fingers, and touched his lips. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


307 


■“Are you dying for him?” she whispered. 

“ And his wife and child. Hush ! Yes.” 

“0 you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?” 

“ Hush ! Yes, my poor sister ; to the last.” 

The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in 
that same hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the 
crowd about it, when a coach going out of Paris drives up to be 
examined. 

“ Who goes here ? Whom have we within ? Papers ! ” 

The papers are handed out, and read. 

“ Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he ? ” 

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering 
old man pointed out. 

“ Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind ? The 
Revolution-fever will have been too much for him ? ” 

Greatly too much for him. 

“ Hah ! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. 
Which is she?” 

This is she. 

“Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evrdmonde; is it 
not?” 

It is. 

“ Hah ! Evr^monde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her 
child. English. This is she ? ” 

She and no other. 

“Kiss me, child of Evrdmonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good 
Republican ; something new in thy family ; remember it ! Sydney 
Carton. Advocate. English. Which is he ? ” 

He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed 
out. 

“ Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon ? ” 

It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented 
that he is not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a 
friend who is under the displeasure of the Republic. 

“ Is that all ? It is not a great deal, that ! Many are under 
the displeasure of the Republic, and must look out at the little 
window. Jarvis Lorry. Banker. English. Which is he?” 

“ I am he. Necessarily, being the last.” 

It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions. 
It is Jarvis Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on 
the coach door, replying to a group of officials. They leisurely walk 
round the carriage and leisurely mount the box, to look at what 
little luggage it carries on the roof ; the country-people hanging 


308 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


about, press nearer to the coach doors and greedily stare in ; a little 
child, carried by its mother, has its short arm held out for it, that it 
may touch the wife of an aristocrat who has gone to the Guillotine. 

“ Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned.” 

“ One can depart, citizen ? ” 

“ One can depart. Forward, my postilions ! A good journey ! ” 

“ I salute you, citizens. — And the first danger passed ! ” 

These are again the words of J arvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands, 
and looks upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping, 
there is the heavy breathing of the insensible traveller. 

“ Are we not going too slowly ? Can they not be induced to go 
faster ? ” asks Lucie, clinging to the old man. 

“ It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them 
too much ; it would rouse suspicion.” 

“ Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued ! ” 

“ The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued.” 

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous 
buildings, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, ave- 
nues of leafless trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the 
soft deep mud is on either side. Sometimes, we strike into the 
skirting mud, to avoid the stones that clatter us and shake us ; 
sometimes, we stick in ruts and sloughs there. The agony of our 
impatience is then so great, that in our wild alarm and hurry we are 
for getting out and running — hiding — doing anything but stopping. 

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, soli- 
tary farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos 
and threes, avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, 
and taken us back by another road ? Is not this the same place 
twice over? Thank Heaven, no. A village. Look back, look 
back, and see if we are pursued ! Hush ! the posting-house. 

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach 
stands in the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood 
upon it of ever moving again ; leisurely, the new horses come into 
visible existence, one by one ; leisurely, the new postilions follow, 
sucking and plaiting the lashes of their whips ; leisurely, the old 
postilions count their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at 
dissatisfied results. All the time, our overfraught hearts are beat- 
ing at a rate that would far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest 
horses ever foaled. 

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are 
left behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down 
the hill, and on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions 
exchange speech with animated gesticulation, and the horses are 
pulled up, almost on their haunches. We are pursued ? 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


309 


“ Ho ! Within the carriage there. Speak then ! ” 

“ What is it ? ” asks Mr. Lorry, looking out at window. 

“ How many did they say ? ” 

“ I do not understand you.” 

“ — At the last post. How many to 'the Guillotine to-day ? ” 
“Fifty-two.” 

“I said so ! A brave number ! My fellow-citizen here would 
have it forty-two ; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillo- 
tine goes handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop ! ” 

The night comes on dark. He moves more ; he is beginning to 
revive, and to speak intelligibly ; he thinks they are still together ; 
he asks him, by his name, what he has in his hand. 0 pity us, 
kind Heaven, and help us ! Look out, look out, and see if we are 
pursued. 

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, 
and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in 
pursuit of us j but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

THE KNITTING DONE. 

In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their 
fate Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Ven- 
geance and Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the 
wine-shop did Madame Defarge confer with these ministers, but in 
the shed of the wood-sawyer, erst a mender of roads. The sawyer 
himself did not participate in the conference, but abided at a little 
distance, like an outer satellite who was not to speak until required, 
or to offer an opinion until invited. 

“ But our Defarge,” said Jacques Three, “ is undoubtedly a good 
Republican ? Eh ? ” 

“There is no better,” the voluble Vengeance protested in her 
shrill notes, “in France.” 

“Peace, little Vengeance,” said Madame Defarge, laying her 
hand with a slight frown on her lieutenant’s lips, “ hear me speak. 
My husband, fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man ; 
he has deserved well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. 
But my husband has his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent 
towards this Doctor.” 

“ It is a great pity,” croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking 
his head, with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth ; “ it is not 
quite like a good citizen ; it is a thing to regret. ” 


310 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ See you,” said madame, “ I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He 
may wear his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him ; it is 
all one to me. But, the Evr^monde people are to be exterminated, 
and the wife and child must follow the husband and father.” 

“She has a fine head for it,” croaked Jacques Three. “ I have 
seen blue eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming 
when Samson held them up.” Ogre that he was, he spok^ like an 
epicure. 

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little. 

“The child also,” observed Jacques Three, with a meditative 
enjoyment of his words, “ has golden hair and blue eyes. And we 
seldom have a child there. It is a pretty sight ! ” 

“In a word,” said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short ab- 
straction, “I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only 
do I feel, since last night, that I dare not confide to him the details 
of my projects ; but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his 
giving warning, and then they might escape.” 

“That must never be,” croaked Jacques Three ; “no one must 
escape. We have not half enough as it is. We ought to have 
six score a day.” 

“ In a word,” Madame Defarge went on, “my husband has not 
my reason for pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not 
his reason for regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must 
act for myself, therefore. Come hither, little citizen.” 

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the 
submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap. 

“ Touching those signals, little citizen,” said Madame Defarge, 
sternly, “ that she made to the prisoners ; you are ready to bear 
witness to them this very day ? ” 

“ Ay, ay, why not ! ” cried the sawyer. “ Every day, in all 
weathers, from two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the 
little one, sometimes without. I know what I know. I have seen 
with my eyes.” 

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in inci- 
dental imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals 
that he had never seen. 

“ Clearly plots,” said Jacques Three. “ Transparently ! ” 

“There is no doubt of the Jury?” inquired Madame Defarge, 
letting her eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile. 

“Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my 
fellow- Jury men.” 

“Now, let me see,” said Madame Defarge, pondering again. 
“Yet once more ! Can I spare this Doctor to my husband ? I 
have no feeling either way. Can I spare him ? ” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


311 


“ He would count as one head,” observed Jacques Three, in a 
low voice. “We really have not heads enough; it would be a 
pity, I think.” 

“ He was signalling with her when I saw her,” argued Madame 
Defarge ; “I cannot speak of one without the other ; and I must 
not be silent, and trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen 
here. For, I am not a bad witness.” 

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their 
fervent protestations that she was the most admirable and marvel- 
lous of witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared 
her to be a celestial witness. 

“ He must take his chance,” said Madame Defarge. “ No, I 
cannot spare him ! You are engaged at three o’clock ; you are 
going to see the batch of to-day executed. — You ? ” 

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly 
replied in the affirmative : seizing the occasion to add that he was 
the most ardent of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the 
most desolate of Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoy- 
ing the pleasure of smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation 
of the droll national barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, 
that he might have been suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes 
that looked contemptuously at him out of Madame Defarge’s 
head) of having his small individual fears for his own personal 
safety, every hour in the day. 

“I,” said madame, “am equally engaged at the same place. 
After it is over — say at eight to-night — come you to me, in 
Saint Antoine, and we will give information against these people 
at my Section.” 

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend 
the citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became em- 
barrassed, evaded her glance as a small dog would have done, 
retreated among his wood, and hid his confusion over the handle 
of his saw. 

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a 
little nearer to the door, and there expounded her further views to 
them thus : 

“ She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. 
She will be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of 
mind to impeach the justice of the Republic. She will be full of 
sympathy with its enemies. I will go to her.” 

“ What an admirable woman ; what an adorable woman ! ” ex- 
claimed Jacques Three, rapturously. “Ah, my cherished!” cried 
The Vengeance ; and embraced her. 

“ Take you my knitting,” said Madame Defarge, placing it in her 


312 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


lieutenant’s hands, “ and have it ready for me in my usual seat. 
Keep me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will 
probably be a greater concourse than usual,* to-day.” 

“I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,” said The Vengeance 
with alacrity, and kissing her cheek. “You will not be late ? ” 

“ I shall be there before the commencement.” 

“And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my 
soul,” said The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already 
turned into the street, “ before the tumbrils arrive ! ” 

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she 
heard, and might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so 
went through the mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. 
The Vengeance and the Juryman, looking after her as she walked 
away, were highly appreciative of her fine figure, and her superb 
moral endowments. 

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid 
a dreadfully disfiguring hand ; but, there was not one among them 
more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way 
along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd 
sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty 
which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and ani- 
mosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those 
qualities ■; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any 
circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding 
sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity 
had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without 
pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone 
out of her. 

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the 
sins of his forefathers ; she saw, not him, but them. It was noth- 
ing to her, that his wife was to be madb a widow and his daughter 
an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were 
her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to 
live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense 
of pity, even for herself If she had been laid low in the streets, 
in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she 
would not have pitied herself ; nor, if she had been ordered to the 
axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling 
than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her 
there. 

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. 
Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird 
way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. 
Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


313 


her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking 
with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple 
freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, 
hare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge 
took her way along the streets. 

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very 
moment waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned 
out last night, the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much 
engaged Mr. Lorry’s attention. It was not merely desirable to 
avoid overloading the coach, but it was of the highest importance 
that the time occupied in examining it and its passengers, should 
be reduced to the utmost ; since their escape might depend on the 
saving of only a few seconds here and there. Finally, he had pro- 
posed, after anxious consideration, that Miss Pross and Jerry, who 
were at liberty to leave the city, should leave it at three o’clock 
in the lightest-wheeled conveyance known to that period. Unen- 
cumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the coach, and, 
passing it and preceding it on the road, would order its horses in 
advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious 
hours of the night, when delay was the most to be dreaded. 

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in 
that pressing emergency. Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and 
Jerry had beheld the coach start, had known who it was that 
Solomon brought, had passed some ten minutes in tortures of 
suspense, and were now concluding their arrangements to follow 
the coach, even as Madame Defarge, taking her way through the 
streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the else-deserted lodging 
in which they held their consultation. - 

“Now what do you think, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, 
whose agitation was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand, 
or move, or live : “ what do you think of our not starting from 
this courtyard ? Another carriage having already gone from here 
to-day, it might awaken suspicion.” 

“My opinion, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “is as you’re right. 
Likewise wot I’ll stand by you, right or wrong.” 

“ I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creat- 
ures,” said Miss Pross, wildly crying, “that I am incapable of 
forming any plan. Are you capable of forming any plan, my dear 
good Mr. Cruncher ? ” 

“ Respectin’ a future spear o’ life, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, 
“ I hope so. Respectin’ any present use o’ this here blessed old 
head o’ mine, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to 
take notice o’ two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to 
record in this here crisis ? ” 


314 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ Oh, for gracious sake ! ” cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, 
“record them at once, and get them out of the way, like an 
excellent man.” 

“First,” said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who 
spoke with an ashy and solemn visage, “them poor things well out 
o’ this, never no more will I do it, never no more ! ” 

“I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher,” returned Miss Pross, “that 
you never will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to 
think it necessary to mention more particularly what it is.” 

“No, miss,” returned Jerry, “it shall not be named to you. 
Second : them poor things well out o’ this, and never no more will 
I interfere with Mrs. Cruncher’s flopping, never no more ! ” 

“ Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,” said Miss 
Pross, striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, “ I have no 
doubt it is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under 
her own superintendence. — 0 my poor darlings ! ” 

“ I go so far as to say, miss, moreover,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, 
with a most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit — “ and 
let my words be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through 
yourself — that wot my opinions respectin’ flopping has undergone 
a change, and that wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. 
Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time.” 

“ There, there, there ! I hope she is, my dear man,” cried the 
distracted Miss Pross, “and I hope she finds it answering her expec- 
tations.” 

“ Forbid it,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with additional solemnity, 
additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold 
out, “ as anything wot I have ever said or done should be wisited 
on my earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now ! Forbid it as 
we shouldn’t all flop (if it was anyways conwenient) to get ’em out 
o’ this here dismal risk ! Forbid it, miss ! Wot I say, for — bid 
it ! ” This was Mr. Cruncher’s conclusion after a protracted but 
vain endeavour to find a better one. 

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, 
came nearer and nearer. 

“ If we ever get back to our native land,” said Miss Pross, “ you 
may rely upon my telling Mrs. Cruncher as much as I may be able 
to remember and understand of what you have so impressively 
said ; and at all events you may be sure that I shall bear witness 
to your being thoroughly in earnest at this dreadful time. Now, 
pray let us think ! My esteemed Mr. Cruncher, let us think ! ” 

Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came 
nearer and nearer. 

“ If you were to go before,” said Miss Pross, “ and stop the 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


315 


vehicle and horses from coming here, and were to wait somewhere 
for me ; wouldn’t that he best ? ” 

Mr. Cruncher thought it might be best. 

“ Where could you wait for me ? ” asked Miss Pross. 

Mr. Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no 
locality biit Temple Bar. Alas ! Temple Bar was hundreds of 
miles away, and Madame Defarge was drawing very near indeed. 

“By the cathedral door,” said Miss Pross. “Would it be much 
out of the way, to take me in, near the great cathedral door between 
the two towers ? ” 

“No, miss,” answered Mr. Cruncher. 

“Then, like the best of men,” said Miss Pross, “go to the post- 
ing-house straight, and make that change.” 

“ I am doubtful,” said Mr. Cruncher, hesitating and shaking 
his head, “ about leaving of you, you see. We don’t know what 
may happen.” ' 

“ Heaven knows we don’t,” returned Miss Pross, “but have no 
fear for me. Take me in at the cathedral, at Three o’Clock, or as 
near it as you can, and I am sure it will be better than our going 
from here. I feel certain of it. There ! Bless you, Mr. Cruncher ! 
Think — not of me, but of the lives that may depend on both of us ! ” 

This exordium, and Miss Pross’s two hands in quite agonised 
entreaty clasping his, decided Mr. Cruncher. With an encouraging 
nod or two, he immediately went out to alter the arrangements, and 
left her by herself to follow as she had proposed. 

The having originated a precaution which was already in course 
of execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of 
composing her appearance so that it should attract no special 
notice in the streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, 
and it was twenty minutes past two. She had no time to lose, 
but must get ready at once. 

Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the de- 
serted rooms, and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every 
open door in them. Miss Pross got a basin of cold water and began 
laving her eyes, which were swollen and red. Haunted by her 
feverish apprehensions, she could not bear to have her sight ob- 
scured for a minute at a time by the dripping water, but constantly 
paused and looked round to see that there was no one watching her. 
In one of those pauses she recoiled and cried out, for she saw a 
figure standing in the room. 

The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed 
to the feet of Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and 
through much staining blood, those feet had come to meet that 
water. 


316 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, “ The wife of 
Evrdmonde ; where is she ? ” 

It flashed upon Miss Pross’s mind that the doors were all stand- 
ing open, and would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut 
them. There were four in the room, and she shut them all. She 
then placed herself before the door of the chamber which Lucie had 
occupied. 

Madame Defarge’s dark eyes followed her through this rapid 
movement, and rested on her when it was finished. Miss Press 
had nothing beautiful about her ; years had not tamed the wildness, 
or softened the grimness, of her appearance; but, she too was a 
determined woman in her different way, and she measured Madame 
Defarge with her eyes, every inch. 

“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” 
said Miss Pross, in her breathing. “ Nevertheless, you shall not 
get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.” 

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with some- 
thing of Miss Pross’s own perception that they two were at bay. 
She saw a tight, hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had 
seen in the same figure a woman with a strong hand, in the years 
gone by. She knew full well that Miss Pross was the family’s 
devoted friend ; Miss Pross knew full well that Madame Defarge 
was the family’s malevolent enemy. 

“On my way yonder,” said Madame Defarge, with a slight 
movement of her hand towards the fatal spot, “ where they reserve 
my chair and my knitting for me, I am come to make my compli- 
ments to her in passing. I wish to see her.” 

“I know that your intentions are evil,” said Miss Pross, “and 
you may depend upon it. I’ll hold my own against them.” 

Each spoke in her own language ; neither understood the other’s 
words ; both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look 
and manner, what the unintelligible words meant. 

“ It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at 
this moment,” said Madame Defarge. “ Good patriots will know 
what that means. Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to 
see her. Do you hear ? ” 

“ If those eyes of yours were bed- winches,” returned Miss Pross, 
“ and I was an English four-poster, they shouldn’t loose a splinter 
of me. No, you wicked foreign woman ; I am your match.” 

Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic re- 
marks in detail; but, she so far understood them as to perceive 
that she was set at naught. 

“ Woman imbecile and pig-like ! ” said Madame Defarge, frown- 
ing. “ I take no answer from you. I demand to see her. Either 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


317 


tell her that I demand to see her, or stand out of the way of the 
door and let me go to her ! ” This, with an angry explanatory 
wave of her right arm. 

“ I little thought,” said Miss Pross, “ that I should ever want 
to understand your nonsensical language ; but I would give all I 
have, except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the 
truth, or any part of it.” 

Neither of them for a single moment released the other’s eyes. 
Madame Defarge had not moved from the spot where she stood 
when Miss Pross first became aware of her ; but, she now advanced 
one step. 

“I am a Briton,” said Miss Pross, “I am desperate. I don’t 
care an English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I 
keep you here, the greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I’ll not 
leave a handful of that dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger 
on me ! ” 

Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her 
eyes between every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole 
breath. Thus Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life. 

But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought 
the irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that 
Madame Defarge so little comprehended as to mistake for weak- 
ness. “Ha, ha!” she laughed, “you poor wretch! What are 
you worth ! I address myself to that Doctor.” Then she raised 
her voice and called out, “ Citizen Doctor ! Wife of Evrdmonde ! 
Child of Evrdmonde ! Any person but this miserable fool, answer 
the Citizeness Defarge ! ” 

Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure -in 
the expression of Miss Pross’s face, perhaps a sudden misgiving 
apart from either suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that 
they were gone. Three of the doors she opened swiftly, and looked 
in. 

“ Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing, 
there are odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that 
room behind you ! Let me look.” 

“Never!” said Miss Pross, who understood the request as per- 
fectly as Madame Defarge understood the answer. 

“ If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pur- 
sued and brought back,” said Madame Defarge to herself. 

“As long as you don’t know whether they are in that room or 
not, you are uncertain what to do,” said Miss Pross to Aerself j 
“and you shall not know that, if I can prevent your knowing it; 
and know that, or not know that, you shall not leave here while I 
can hold you.” 


318 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped 
me, I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door,” 
said Madame Defarge. 

“We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary court- 
yard, we are not likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength 
to keep you here, while every minute you are here is worth a hun- 
dred thousand guineas to my darling,” said Miss Pross. 

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct 
/" of the moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and 
held her tight. It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle 
and to strike; Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, 
always so much stronger than hate, clasped her tight, and even 
lifted her from the floor in the struggle that they had. The two 
hands of Madame Defarge buffeted and tore her face ; but. Miss 
Pross, with her head down, held her round the waist, and clung to 
' her with more than the hold of a drowning woman. 

; Soon, Madame Defarge’s hands ceased to strike, and felt at her 
. 'encircled waist. “ It is under my arm,” said Miss Pross, in smoth- 
ered tones, “ you shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless 
Heaven for it. I hold you till one or other of us faints or dies ! ” 

Madame Defarge’s hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked 
up, saw what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, 
and stood alone — blinded with smoke. 

All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an 
awful stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious 
woman whose body lay lifeless on the ground. 

In the first fright and horror of her situation. Miss Pross passed 
the body as far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to 
call for fruitless help. Happily, she bethought herself of the con- 
sequences of what she did, in time to check herself and go back. 
It was dreadful to go in at the door again ; but, she did go in, and 
even went near it, to get the bonnet and other things that she must 
wear. These she put on, out on the staircase, first shutting and 
locking the door and taking away the key. She then sat down on 
the stairs a few moments to breathe and to cry, and then got up 
and hurried away. 

By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly 
have gone along the streets without being stopped. By good fort- 
une, too, she was naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to 
show disfigurement like any other woman. She needed both 
advantages, for the marks of griping fingers were deep in her face, 
and her hair was torn, and her dress (hastily composed with un- 
steady hands) was clutched and dragged a hundred ways. 

In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river. 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


319 


Arriving at the cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and 
waiting there, she thought, what if the key were already taken in 
a net, what if it were identified, what if the door were opened and 
the remains discovered, what if she were stopped at the gate, sent 
to prison, and charged with murder ! In the midst of these flutter- 
ing thoughts, the escort appeared, took her in, and took her away. 

“Is there any noise in the streets she asked him. 

“ The usual noises,” Mr. Cruncher replied ; and looked surprised 
by the question and by her aspect. 

“I don’t hear you,” said Miss Pross. “What do you say'?” 

It was in vain for Mr. Cruncher to repeat what he said ; Miss 
Pross could not hear him. “So I’ll nod my head,” thought Mr. 
Cruncher, amazed, “at all events she’ll see that,” And she did. 

“ Is there any noise in the streets now 1 ” asked Miss Pross again, 
presently. 

Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head. 

“I don’t hear it.” 

“ Gone deaf in an hour *? ” said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with 
his mind much disturbed; “wot’s come to her'?” 

“I feel,” said Miss Pross, “as if there had been a flash and a 
crash, and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this 
life.” 

“ Blest if she ain’t in a queer condition ! ” said Mr. Cruncher, 
more and more disturbed. “Wot can she have been a takin’, to 
keep her courage up 1 Hark ! There’s the roll of them dreadful 
carts ! You can hear that, miss '? ” 

“ I can hear,” said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her, 
“nothing. 0, my good man, there was first a great crash, and 
then a great stillness, and that stillness seems to be fixed and un- 
changeable, never to be broken any more as long as my life lasts.” 

“ If she don’t hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh 
their journey’s end,” said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder, 
“ it’s my opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in 
this world.” 

And indeed she never did. 


CHAPTER XV. 

THE FOOTSTEPS DIE OUT FOR EVER. 

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and 
harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All 
the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination 
could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. 


320 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and 
climate, a blade, a leaf, a root,’ a sprig, a peppercorn; which will 
grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that 
have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once 
more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the 
same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and 
oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit 
according to its kind. 

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to 
what they were, thou powerful enchanter. Time, and they shall be 
seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of 
feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that 
are not my father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions 
of starving peasants ! No ; the great magician who majestically 
works out the appointed order of the Creator, never reverses his 
transformations. “ If thou be changed into this shape by the will 
of God,” say the seers to the enchanted, in the wise Arabian 
stories, “ then remain so ! But, if thou wear this form through 
mere passing conjuration, then resume thy former aspect ! ” Change- 
less and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along. 

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to 
plough up a long crooked furrow among the populace in the 
streets. Ridges of faces are thrown to this side and to that, and 
the ploughs go steadily onward. So used are the regular inhabi- 
tants of the houses to the spectacle, that in many windows there 
are no people, and in some the occupation of the hands is not so 
much as suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in the tum- 
brils. Here and there, the inmate has visitors to see the sight ; 
then he points his finger, with something of the complacency of 
a curator or authorised exponent, to this cart and to this, and 
seems to tell who sat here yesterday, and who there the day 
before. 

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all 
things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare ; others, with 
a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated 
with drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair ; again, there are 
some so heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude 
such glances as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Sev- 
eral close their eyes, and think, or try to get their straying 
thoughts together. Only one, and he a miserable creature, of a 
crazed aspect, is so shattered and made drunk by horror, that he 
sings, and tries to dance. Not one of the whole number appeals 
by look or gesture, to the pity of the people. 

There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the turn- 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


321 


brils, and faces are often turned up to some of^ them, and they are 
asked some question. It would seem to be always the same ques- 
tion, for, it is always followed by a press of people towards the 
third cart. The horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently point 
out one man in it with their swords. The leading curiosity is, to 
know which is he ; he stands at the back of the tumbril with his 
head bent down, to converse with a mere girl who sits on the side 
of the cart, and holds his hand. He has no curiosity or care for 
the scene about him, and always speaks to the girl. Here and 
there in the long street of St. Honord, cries are raised against him. 
If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as he shakes 
his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily 
touch his face, his arms being bound. 

On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tum- 
brils, stands the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of 
them : not there. He looks into the second : not there. He 
already asks himself, “Has he sacrificed me?” when his face 
clears, as he looks into the third. 

“ Which is Evr^monde ? ” says a man behind him. 

“ That. At the back there.” 

“ With his hand in the girl’s ? ” 

“ Yes.” 

The man cries, “ Down, Evrdmonde ! To the Guillotine all 
aristocrats ! Down, Evrdmonde ! ” 

“ Hush, hush ! ” the Spy entreats him, timidly. 

“ And why not, citizen ? ” 

“ He is going to pay the forfeit : it will be paid in five minutes 
more. Let him be at peace.” 

But the man continuing to exclaim, “Down, Evrdmonde !” the 
face of Evrdmonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evrd- 
monde then sees the Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes 
his way. 

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed 
among the populace is turning round, to come on into the place of 
execution, and end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, 
now crumble in and close behind the last plough as it passes on, 
for all are following to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in 
chairs, as in a garden of public diversion, are a number of women, 
busily knitting. On one of the foremost chairs, stands The Ven- 
geance, looking about for her friend. 

“ Thdriise ! ” she cries, in her shrill tones. “ Who has seen her ? 
Thdr^se Defarge ! ” 

“She never missed before,” says a knitting- woman of the sister- 
hood. 

Y 


322 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“ No ; nor will she miss now,” cries The Vengeance, petulantly. 
“ Th^ihse.” 

“ Louder,” the woman recommends. 

Ay ! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely 
hear thee. Louder yet. Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, 
and yet it will hardly bring her. Send other women up and down 
to seek her, lingering somewhere ; and yet, although the messen- 
gers have done dread deeds, it is questionable whether of their 
own wills they will go far enough to find her ! .. 

“ Bad Fortune ! ” cries The Vengeance, stamping her ^t in the 
chair, “and here are the tumbrils ! And Evrdmonde will be de- 
spatched in a wink, and she not here ! See her knitting in my 
hand, and her empty chair ready for her. I cry with vexation 
and disappointment ! ” 

As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tum- 
brils begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte 
Guillotine are robed and ready. Crash ! — A head is held up, and 
the knitting-women who scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a 
moment ago when it could think and speak, count One. 

The second tumbril empties and moves on ; the third comes up. 
Crash ! — And the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in 
their work, count Two. / 

The supposed Evr^monde descends, and the seamstress is lifted 
out next after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in 
getting out, but still holds it as he promised. He gently places 
her with her back to the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up 
and falls, and she looks into his face and thanks him. 

“ But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I 
am naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart ; nor should I have 
been able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that 
we might have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were 
sent to me by Heaven.” 

“ Or you to me,” says Sydney Carton. “ Keep your eyes upon 
me, dear child, and mind no other object.” 

“ I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing 
when I let it go, if they are rapid.” 

“ They will be rapid. Fear not ! ” 

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they 
speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to 
hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, 
else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark 
highway, to repair home together, and to rest in her bosom. 

“ Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last 
question ? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me — just a little.” 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


323 


“ Tell me what it is.” 

“ I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, 
whom I love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and 
she lives in a farmer’s house in the south country. Poverty parted 
us, and she knows nothing of my fate — for I cannot write — and 
if I could, how should I tell her ! It is better as it is.” 

“Yes, yes : better as it is.” 

“ What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am 
still thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives 
me so much support, is this : — If the Republic really does good to 
the poor, and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer 
less, she may live a long time : she may even live to be old.” 

“What then, my gentle sister?” 

“Do you think : ” the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so 
much endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and 
tremble' : “ that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in 
the better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully 
sheltered ? ” ^ 

“It cannot be, my child ; there is no Time there, and no trouble 
there.” 

“You comfort me so much ! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss 
you now ? Is the moment come ? ” 

“Yes.” 

She kisses his lips ; he kisses hers ; they solemnly bless each 
other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it ; nothing 
worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She 
goes next before him — is gone ; the knitting-women count Twenty- 
Two. 

“ I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord : he that 
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” 

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, 
the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, 
so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, 
all flashes away. Twenty-Three. 

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the 
peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there. Many added that he 
looked sublime and prophetic. 

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe — a 
woman — had asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long 
before, to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspir- 
ing her. If he had given any utterance to his, and they were pro- 
phetic, they would have been these : 


324 


A TALE OF TWO CITIES. 


“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, 
the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on 
the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, 
before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city 
and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles 
to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long 
years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time 
of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for 
itself and wearing out. 

“I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, 
prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. 
I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I 
see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful 
to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old 
man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with 
all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. 

“ I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts 
of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, 
weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her 
husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly 
bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred 
in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both. 

“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my 
name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once 
was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made 
illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon 
it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured 
men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and 
golden hair, to this place — then fair to look upon, with not a 
trace of this day’s disfigurement — and I hear him tell the child 
my story, with a tender and a faltering voice. 

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done ; 
it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” 


THE END. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD 


FACSIMILE OF THE VIGNETTE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 



FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 


THE MYSTEEY 


EDWIN DEOOD. 


BY 

CHAELES DICKENS. 


WITH TWELVE I LLUSTRATIONS BY S. L. FILDES, 
AND A PORTRAIT. 


LONDON: 

CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193 PICCADILLY. 

1870. 


[ The right of Translation is reserved.'] 


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FACSIMILE OF THE WRAPPER TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 


No. I] APRIL, 1870. [Price One Shilling. 



LONDON : CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 


Advertisements to be sent to the Publishers, and ADAMS & FRANCIS, 59, Fleet Street, B.C 

[The right oj TransUition 1 


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LON DON; 

S'- CHAPMAN & HALL J93 . PICCADI LLY 

■‘i-V. . 


INTRODUCTION. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

The first idea which Charles Dickens had for the new story, 
which was unhappily to be his last and which, indeed, was 
destined never to be finished, was thus expressed in a letter 
written in July, 1869 : Two people, boy and girl, or very 
young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married 
after many years — at the end of the book. The interest 
to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the 
impossibility of telling what will be done with that impend- 
ing fate.” 

Except for such slight effect as it may have had on the 
relations between Rosa and Edwin this idea was abandoned, 
and the mystery attendant on the murder of Edwin Drood 
and the discovery of his murderer was adopted for the 
backbone of the story. As all the world knows, only six 
numbers, out of the twelve which were to make up the 
book, were published when the hand of death put a stop to 
the work, and no clue to the plot or to the manner of its 
working out was found among Charles Dickens’s papers 
after his death. 

A great deal of ingenuity has been wasted by critics and 
writers of magazine articles in 'making guesses at the 
author’s intentions, and several ^^continuations” and se- 
quels ” have been published. Of these may be mentioned 
a disgraceful and impudent American imposture, purporting 
to be the conclusion of the book written by Charles Dickens’s 
spirit through a medium, one Thomas Power James. This 
man posed as a young mechanic” of Brattleboro, Vermont, 
but was described in an article in the Boston Traveler in 
the following uncomplimentary terms : He has the char- 
acter of a smart, enterprising adventurer, with no nice 
scruples of honour to embarrass his energies; with but 
little education save what has been picked up in his busi- 

331 


332 


INTllODUCTION, 


ness ; some thirty-five years of age ; plausible and confident 
in address and conversation, and full of whims and unac- 
countable impulses.” It is hardly necessary to say that 
this impostor’s work possessed no sort of interest or merit, 
literary or otherwise. Not much more can be said of A Great 
Mystery Solved, by Gillan Vase, which was published, in 
1878, in three volumes by Eemington & Co., Arundel Street, 
Strand, and which begins with a description of Mr. Cri- 
sparkle’s ” thoughts and fancies ; or of John Jasper’s Secret, 
by an anonymous writer, which was issued from equally 
anonymous ‘^Publishing offices. No. 342 Strand,” in 1872, 
and which was got up, for obvious reasons, in the closest 
possible imitation of the original. Lastly, may be men- 
tioned Watched by the Dead, a loving study of Dickens’s 
Half-Told Tale, by Eichard A. Proctor, W. H. Allen & Co., 
Waterloo Place, 1887, which was done carefully and ingen- 
iously enough, but which, as to the main point, had the 
disadvantage of being hopelessly and utterly wrong. 

Almost without exception the writers who have endeav- 
oured to solve the supposed riddle have insisted upon it that 
Edwin Drood was not murdered at all, and bring him back 
for the discomfiture of Jasper under all sorts of ridiculous 
disguises and in all sorts of absurd situations. Mr. Proctor, 
among others, had no doubt at all about it. Datchery is 
Edwin Drood redivivus, he is quite certain, and the last 
sentence of Watched by the Dead run thus: “Jasper was to 
have been tracked remorselessly to his death by the man 
whom he supposed he had slain. Eisen from his grave, 
Drood was to have driven Jasper to his tomb, there to seek 
for the dreaded evidence of his guilt: but to find there 
instead, alive and implacable, the man whom he had doomed 
to a sudden and terrible death, and in whose dust he had 
come to seek for the dreaded evidence of his guilt.” It is 
almost a pity that so much ingenuity and pains should have 
been wasted. If words mean anything, Charles Dickens’s 
description of his plan to Mr. Forster, in which he speaks 
plainly of the “ murder of a nephew by his uncle,” and of 
the way in which the murderer is ultimately to confess his 
crime, would settle the point at once. But Mr. Proctor was 
content to go a long way about to explain this statement 
away, by supposing that Charles Dickens, meaning — for the 
first time in his life — to mislead Mr. Forster as to his inten- 
tions in regard to a book, had told a wilful lie to evade a 
question prompted, in some mysterious way, by “ Forster’s 


INTRODUCTION. 


333 


vanity.” That this is absolutely impossible nobody who 
knew anything of my father need be told. 

But I happen to have a little bit of evidence, myself, as 
to this matter, which ought to be absolutely conclusive — 
the evidence of what my father said to me. It was during 
the last walk I ever had with him at Gadshill, and our talk, 
which had been principally concerned with literary matters 
connected with All the Year Round, presently drifting to 
Edwin Drood, my father asked me if I did not think that 
he had let out too much of his story too soon. I assented, 
and added, ^^Of course, Edwin Drood was murdered?” 
Whereupon he turned upon me with an expression of aston- 
ishment at my having asked such an unnecessary question, 
and said : “ Of course ; what else do you suppose ? ” 

I may add, in this connection, that I have frequently been 
asked by unknown correspondents for particulars of a con- 
tinuation of Edwin Drood which is supposed to have been 
written by Wilkie Collins “ at the request of the Dickens 
family.” Of course there is no such book. Neither the 

Dickens family” nor Wilkie Collins would have enter- 
tained such an idea for a moment. 

Mr. Eorster expresses surprise that Charles Dickens 
should have caused to be inserted in the agreement with 
Chapman & Hall, for the publication of Edwin Drood, a 
clause providing for the steps to be taken in the event of the 
book being unfinished. But, considering the state of Charles 
Dickens’s health and the shock he had had in the spring of 
1869, such a precaution seems to have been only a natural 
and business-like one to adopt, although it had not been 
taken in regard to any of the previous books. 

The clause ran as follows : If the said Charles Dickens 
shall die during the composition of the said work of the 
Mystery of Edwin Drood, or shall otherwise become incapable 
of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly 
numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Eorster, Esq., 
one of Her Majesty’s Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case 
of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such person 
as shall be named by Her Majesty’s Attorney-General for the 
time being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid 
by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators, 
to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so 
much of the said work as shall not have been completed 
for publication.” The sum paid by Messrs. Chapman & 
Hall for the first 25,000 copies was £7500, and publishers 


334 


INTRODUCTION. 


and author were to take equal shares in the profit of all 
further sales. For the American advance sheets the sum 
of £1000 was paid. During Charles Dickens’s lifetime the 
monthly sale reached 50,000. 

The first number of Edwin Brood was published in April, 
1870, and the sixth and last in September. These parts 
were bound in green wrappers designed by Charles Allston 
Collins — Charles Dickens’s son-in-law — contained, in each, 
two illustrations by Luke Fildes, F.A. ; and were published 
at one shilling. The six parts, when bound together in 
cloth, contained in addition to the illustrations, a vignette 
title-page, and a portrait of Charles Dickens — one of the 
best ever taken — engraved on steel after a photograph by 
Mason & Co. (taken in 1868), and were sold at seven shil- 
lings and sixpence. 

Facsimiles of wrapper and title-page will be found at 
pages 329, 330 of this introduction. 

The original manuscript is at South Kensington. 

With the sixth part, and with the complete book — com- 
plete, that is, as far as it went — was published the follow- 
ing preliminary note : — 

All that was left in manuscript of Edwin Brood is contained in 
the number now published — the sixth. Its last entire page had 
not been written two hours when the event occurred which one 
very touching passage in it (grave and sad but also cheerful and 
reassuring) might seem almost to have anticipated. The only 
notes in reference to the story that have since been found concern 
that portion of it exclusively, which is treated in the earlier num- 
bers. Beyond the clues therein afforded to its conduct or catas- 
trophe, nothing whatever remains; and it is believed that what 
the author would himself have most desired is done, in placing 
before the reader without further note or suggestion the fragment 
of The Mystery of Edwin Brood. 

12th August, 1870. 

Arrangements had been made by Charles Dickens for the 
dramatisation of the story by himself in collaboration with 
Dion Boucicault, and, after my father’s death, Boucicault 
proposed that I should join him in the work, with a view to 
the production of the play at the Lyceum Theatre — then 
under the management of Colonel ” H. L. Bateman — with 
Mr. Henry Irving as John Jasper. But, shortly after we 
had commenced our labours, a foolish version of the book 


INTRODUCTION. 


335 


was brought out at the Surrey Theatre, with Henry Neville 
as Jasper — and with a live Edwin Drood turning up, dis- 
guised as a barrister, at Neville Landless’s trial. The produc- 
tion of this piece — it was called the Mystery of Cloisterham 
— with the express sanction and approval of Mr. Forster, 
who declined to take any notice of the remonstrances which 
Boucicault and I addressed to him, of course put a stop to 
, our play. The book has been dramatised more than once 
since, but always, I believe, with the same altogether errone- 
ous idea as to what was really meant by the mystery of 
Edwin Drood. 

CHAELES DICKENS 


THE YOUNGER. 



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THE MYSTERY 


OF 




EDWIN DROOD. 


CHAPTER I. 

THE DAWN. 

An ancient English Cathedral Tower ? How can the ancient 
English Cathedral Tower he here ! The well-known massive grey 
square tower of its old Cathedral ? How can that be here ! There 
is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from 
any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, 
and who has set it up ? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders 
for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is 
so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long 
procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice 
ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white ele- 
phants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in 
number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the 
background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on 
the grim spike. Stay ! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty 
spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all 
awry ? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to 
the consideration of this possibility. 

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered conscious- 
ness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, 
supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He 
is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged 
window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable 
court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bed- 
stead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, 
also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, 
a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or 
stupor ; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as 
z 337 


338 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


slie blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red 
spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him 
what he sees of her. 

“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. 

“ Have another ? ” 

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead. 

“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” 
the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. “ Poor me, poor 
me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor 
me, the business is slack, is slack ! Few Chinamen about the 
Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say ! 
Here’s another ready for ye, deary. Ye’ll remember like a good 
soul, won’t ye, that the market price is drefile high just now ? More 
nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful ! And ye’ll remem- 
ber that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the 
court ; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of 
mixing it ? Ye’ll pay up according, deary, won’t ye ? ” 

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling 
at it, inhales much of its contents. 

“ 0 me, 0 me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad ! It’s nearly 
ready for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes 
like to drop off ! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, 

‘ I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market 
price of opium, and pay according.’ 0 my poor head ! I makes 
my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, deary — this is one — 
and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of 
this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, 
my poor nerves ! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore 
I took to this ; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it 
takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.” 

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning 
over on her face. 

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth- 
stone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance 
at his three companions. He notices that the woman has opium- 
smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form 
of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour, are repeated in her. Said 
Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods or 
Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and 
dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still. 

“ What visions can she have ? ” the waking man muses, as he 
turns her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. “ Visions 
of many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit ? Of 
an increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


339 


upright again, and this horrible court swept clean ? What can she 
rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that ! — Eh?” 

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings. 

“ Unintelligible ! ” 

As he watches the spasdmodic shoots and darts that break out of 
her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some con- 
tagion in them seizes upon him ; insomuch that he has to withdraw 
himself to a lean arm-chair by the hearth — placed there, perhaps, 
for such emergencies — and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has 
got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation. 

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him 
with both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. 
The Chinaman clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and 
protests. 

“ What do you say ? ” 

A watchful pause. 

“ Unintelligible ! ” 

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon 
with an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags 
him forth upon the floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half- 
risen attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with 
his arms, and draws a phantom knife. It then becomes apparent 
that the woman has taken possession of this knife, for safety’s sake ; 
for, she too starting up, and restraining and expostulating with him, 
the knife is visible in her dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop 
back, side by side. 

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, 
but to no purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into 
the air, it has had no sense or sequence. Wherefore “unintelli- 
gible ! ” is again the comment of the watcher, made with some re- 
assured nodding of his head, and a gloomy smile. He then lays 
certain silver money on the table, finds his hat, gropes his way down 
the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some rat-ridden door- 
keeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out. 

That same afternoon, the massive grey square tower of an old 
cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are 
going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one 
would say, from his haste to reach the open cathedral door. The 
choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he 
arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the pro- 
cession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred 
gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the 
procession having scuttled into their places, hide their faces j and 


340 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


then the intoned words, “When the Wicked Man — ” rise 
among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered 
thunder. 


CHAPTER II. 

A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO. 

Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, 
may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward 
towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will 
suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight 
for some distance, and will there poise and linger ; conveying to 
mere men the fancy that it is of some occult importance to the 
body politic, that this artful couple should pretend to have re- 
nounced connection with it. 

Similarly, service being over in the old cathedrabwith the square 
tower, and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable per- 
sons of rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their 
steps, and walk together in the echoing Close. 

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is 
fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia 
creeper on the cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves 
down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and 
a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked uneven 
flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust 
of tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about. Some of these 
leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low arched cathe- 
dral door ; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them forth 
again with their feet ; this done, one of the two locks the door with 
a goodly key, and the other flits away with a folio music-book. 

“Mr. Jasper was that. Tope 

“Yes, Mr. Dean.” 

“ He has stayed late.” 

“Yes, Mr. Dean. I have stayed for him, your Reverence. He 
has been took a little poorly.” 

“Say ‘taken,’ Tope — to the Dean,” the younger rook inter- 
poses in a low tone with this touch of correction, as who should 
say: “You may offer bad grammar to the laity, or the humbler 
clergy, not to the Dean.” 

Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be 
high with excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to per- 
ceive that any suggestion has been tendered to him. 

“And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken — for, as 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


341 


Mr. Crisparkle has remarked, it is better to say taken — taken 
— ” repeats the Dean ; “ when and how has Mr. Jasper been 
Taken — ” 

“ Taken, sir,” Tope deferentially murmurs. 

“ — Poorly, Tope?” 

“ Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed — ” 

“ I wouldn’t say ‘ That breathed,’ Tope,” Mr. Crisparkle inter- 
poses with the same touch as before. “Not English — to the 
Dean.” 

“ Breathed to that extent,” the Dean (not unflattered by this 
indirect homage) condescendingly remarks, “ would be preferable.” 

“ Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short ” — thus dis- 
creetly does Mr. Tope Avork his way round the sunken rock — • 
“ when he came in, that it distressed him mightily to get his notes 
out : which was perhaps the cause of his having a kind of fit on 
him after a little. His memory grew Dazed.” Mr. Tope, with 
his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, shoots this word out, 
as deifying him to improve upon it : “ and a dimness and giddiness 
crept over him as strange as ever I saw ; though he didn’t seem 
to mind it particularly, himself. However, a little time and a 
little water brought him out of his Daze.” Mr. Tope repeats the 
word and its emphasis, with the air of saying : “ As I have made 
a success. I’ll make it again.” 

“And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?” asked 
the Dean. 

“Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself. And I’m 
glad to see he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the 
wet, and the Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch 
this afternoon, and he was very shivery.” 

They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the 
Close, with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it. Through 
its latticed window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening 
scene, involving in shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper 
covering the building’s front. As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes 
the hour, a ripple of wind goes through these at their distance, like 
a ripple of the solemn sound that hums through tomb and tower, 
broken niche and defaced statue, in the pile close at hand. 

“ Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him ? ” the Dean asks. 

“ No, sir,” replied the Verger, “but expected. There’s his own 
solitary shadow betwixt his two windows — the one looking this 
way, and the one looking down into the High Street — drawing 
his own curtains now.” 

“ Well, well,” says the Dean, Avith a sprightly air of breaking up 
the little conference, “ I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too 


342 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


much set upon his nephew. Our affections, however laudable, in 
this transitory world, should never master us; we should guide 
them, guide them. I find I am not disagreeably reminded of my 
dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell. Perhaps Mr. Crisparkle you 
will, before going home, look in on Jasper?” 

“ Certainly, Mr. Dean. And tell him that you had the kindness 
to desire to know how he was ? ” 

“Ay; do so, do so. Certainly. Wished to know how he was. 
By all means. Wished to know how he was.” 

With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his 
quaint hat as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely 
gaiters towards the ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick 
house where he is at present, “ in residence ” with Mrs. Dean and 
Miss Dean. 

Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually 
pitching himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in 
the surrounding country ; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, 
musical, classical, cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, 
and boy-like ; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately 
“ Coach ” upon the chief Pagan high roads, but since promoted by 
a patron (grateful for a well-taught son) to his present Christian 
beat ; betakes himself to the gatehouse, on his way home to his 
early tea. 

“ Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.” 

“0, it was nothing, nothing ! ” 

“You look a little worn.” 

“ Do I ? 0, I don’t think so. What is better, I don’t feel so. 

Tope has made too much of it, I suspect. It’s his trade to make 
the most of everything appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.” 

“ I may tell the Dean — I call expressly from the Dean — that 
you are all right again ? ” 

The reply, with a slight smile, is : “ Certainly ; with my respects 
and thanks to the Dean.” 

- “ I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.” 

“I expect the dear fellow every moment.” 

“Ah ! He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.” 

“ More good than a dozen doctors. For I love him dearly, and 
I don’t love doctors, or doctors’ stuff.” 

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, 
lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whiskers. He looks older 
than he is, as dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his 
face and figure are good, his manner is a little sombre. His room 
is a little sombre, and may have had its influence in forming his 
manner. It is mostly in shadow. Even when the sun shines bril- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


343 


liantly, it seldom touches the grand piano in the recess, or the folio 
music-books on the stand, or the book-shelves on the wall, or the 
unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chim- 
neypiece ; her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her 
beauty remarkable, for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of 
saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself. (There is not the 
least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere daub ; but it is 
clear that the painter has made it humorously — one might almost 
say, revengefully — like the original.) 

“We shall miss you, Jasper, at the ‘Alternate Musical Wednes- 
days ’ to-night j but no doubt you are best at home. Good night. 
God bless you ! ‘ Tell me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me ; tell me-e-e, 

have you seen (have you seen, have you seen, have you seen) 
my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way ! ’ ” Melodiously good Minor 
Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus delivers himself, in 
musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face from the door- 
way and conveys it down-stairs. 

Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend 
Septimus and somebody else, at the stair-foot. Mr. Jasper listens, 
starts from his chair, and catches a young fellow in his arms, 
exclaiming : 

“ My dear Edwin ! ” 

“ My dear Jack ! So glad to see you ! ” 

“ Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your 
own corner. Your feet are not wet ? Pull your boots off*. Do 
pull yoiir boots off.” 

“My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone. Don’t moddley- 
coddley, there’s a good fellow. I like anything better than being 
moddley-coddleyed.” 

With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained 
in a genial outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and 
looks on intently at the young fellow, divesting himself of his out- 
ward coat, hat, gloves, and so forth. Once for all, a look of in- 
ten tness and intensity — a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and 
yet devoted affection — is always, now and ever afterwards, on the 
Jasper face whenever thQ Jasper face is addressed in this direction. 
And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this occasion or on 
any other, dividedly addressed ; it is always concentrated. 

“Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner. Jack. Any 
dinner. Jack?” 

Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and dis- 
closes a small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein 
a comely dame is in the act of setting dishes on table. 

“ What a jolly old Jack it is ! ” cries the young fellow, with a 


344 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

clap of his hands. “Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday 
is it ? ” 

“Not yours, I know,” Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider. 

“Not mine, you know ? No ; not mine, 1 know ! Pussy’s ! ” 

Fixed as the look the young fellow meets, is, there is yet in it 
some strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the 
chimneypiece. 

“ Pussy’s, Jack ! We must drink Many happy returns to her. 
Come, uncle ; take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.” 

As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder, 
Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on his shoulder, and so Mar- 
seillaise-wise they go in to dinner. 

“And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!” cries the boy. “Lovelier 
than ever ! ” 

“ Never you mind me, Master Edwin,” retorts the Verger’s wife ; 
“ I can take care of myself.” 

“You can’t. You’re much too handsome. Give me a kiss 
because it’s Pussy’s birthday.” 

“ I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,” 
Mrs. Tope blushingly retorts, after being saluted. “Your uncle’s 
too much wrapt up in you, that’s where it is. He makes so much 
of you, that it’s my opinion you think you’ve only to call your 
Pussys by the dozen, to make ’em come.” 

“You forget, Mrs. Tope,” Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place 
at the table with a genial smile, “ and so do you, Ned, that Uncle 
and Nephew are words prohibited here by common consent and 
express agreement. For what we are going to receive His holy 
name be praised ! ” 

“ Done like the Dean ! Witness, Edwin Drood ! Please to 
carve. Jack, for I can’t.” 

This sally ushers in the dinner. Little to the present purpose, 
or to any purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed 
of. At length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a 
decanter of rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table. 

“I say! Tell me. Jack,” the young fellow then flows on : “do 
you really and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship 
divided us at all % 1 don’t.” 

“ Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,” 
is the reply, “ that I have that feeling instinctively.” 

“ As a rule ! Ah, maybe ! But what is a difference in age of 
half a dozen years or so ? And some uncles, in large families, are 
even younger than their nephews. By George, I wish it was the 
case with us ! ” 

“Why?” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


345 


^ “ Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as 
wise as Begone, dull Care ! that turned a young man grey, and 
Begone, dull Care ! that turned an old man to clay. — Halloa 
Jack ! Don’t drink.” ’ 

“Why not?” 

“ Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns pro- 
posed ! Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em ! Happy returns, I mean.” 

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended 
hand, as if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. 
Jasper drinks the toast in silence. 

“ Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and 
all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray ! — And now. Jack, 
let’s have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers ? 
Pass me one, and take the other.” Crack. “How’s Pussy getting 
on. Jack?” 

“ With her music ? Fairly.” 

“ What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are. Jack ! But I 
know. Lord bless you ! Inattentive, isn’t she ? ” 

“ She can learn anything, if she will.” 

“ If she will ! Egad, that’s it. But if she won’t ? ” 

Crack ! — on Mr. Jasper’s part. 

“ How’s she looking. Jack ? ” 

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he 
returns : “Very like your sketch indeed.” 

“ I am a little proud of it,” says the young fellow, glancing up 
at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and 
taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers 
in the air : “Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to 
have caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often 
enough.” 

Crack ! — on Edwin Drood’s part. 

Crack! — on Mr. Jasper’s part. 

“In point of fact,” the former resumes, after some silent dipping 
among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, “ I see it 
whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don’t find it on her face, I leave 
it there. — You know I do. Miss Scornful Pert. Booh.1 ” With 
a twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait. 

Crack ! crack ! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part. 

Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood. 

Silence on both sides. 

“ Have you lost your tongue. Jack ? ” 

“ Have you found yours, Ned ? ” 

“No, but really ; — isn’t it, you know, after all — ” 

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly. 


346 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a 
matter? There, Jack! I tell you I If I could choose, I would 
choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world.” 

“ But you have not got to choose.” 

“That’s what I complain of. My dead and , gone father and 
Pussy’s dead and gone father must needs marry us together by 
anticipation. Why the — Devil, I was going to say, if it had been 
respectful to their memory — couldn’t they leave us alone ? ” 

“Tuti tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of 
gentle deprecation. 

“Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for you. You can 
take it easily. Your life is not laid down to scale, and lined and 
dotted out for you, like a surveyor’s plan. You have no uncom- 
fortable suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has any- 
body an uncomfortable suspicion that she is forced upon you, or 
that you are forced upon her. You can choose for yourself. Life, 
for you., is a plum with the natural bloom on ; it hasn’t been over- 
carefully wiped off for you — ” 

“ Don’t stop, dear fellow. Go on.” 

“Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings. Jack?” 

“How can you have hurt my feelings ? ” 

“ Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill 1 There’s a 
strange film come over your eyes.” 

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as 
if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. 
After a while he says faintly : 

“ I have been taking opium for a pain — an agony — that some- 
times overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me 
like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of 
passing ; they will be gone directly. Look away from me. They 
will go all the sooner.” 

With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes 
downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing his own gaze 
on the fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon 
his elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, 
with thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of 
his breath, becomes as he was before. On his so subsiding in his chair, 
his nephew gently and assiduously tends him while he quite re- 
covers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his 
nephew’s shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the 
purport of his words — indeed with something of raillery or banter 
in it — thus addresses him : 

“ There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house ; but you 
thought there was none in mine, dear Ned.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


347 


“Upon my life, Jack, I did think so. However, when I come 
to consider that even in Pussy’s house — if she had one — and in 
mine — if I had one — ” 

“You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of 
myself) what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around 
me, no distracting commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of 
place, myself devoted to the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.” 

“ I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack ; but you 
see, you, speaking of yourself^ almost necessarily leave out much that 
I should have put in. For instance : I should have put in the fore- 
ground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, 
or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputa- 
tion of having done such wonders with the choir ; your choosing your 
society, and holding such an independent position in this queer old 
place; your gift of teaching (why, even Pussy, who don’t like 
being taught, says there never was such a Master as you are !), and 
your connection.” 

“Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.” 

“ Hate it. Jack 1 ” (Much bewildered.) 

“ I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds 
me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you ” 

“ Beautiful ! Quite celestial ! ” 

“ It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it. The 
echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with 
my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life 
away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it 
than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving 
demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do ? 
Must I take to carving them out of my heart ? ” 

“ I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life. Jack,” 
Edwin Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to 
lay a sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with 
an anxious face. 

“ I know you thought so. They all think so.” 

“Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating aloud. 

“ Pussy thinks so.” 

“ When did she tell you that 1 ” 

“ The last time I was here. You remember when. Three • 
months ago.” 

“ How did she phrase it ? ” 

“ 0, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that 
you were made for your vocation.” 

The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in 
him. 


348 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head 
with a grave cheerfulness, “ I must subdue myself to my vocation : 
which is much the same thing outwardly. It’s too late to find 
another now. This is a confidence between us.” 

“It shall be sacredly preserved. Jack.” 

“ I have reposed it in you, because — ” 

“ I feel it, I assure you. Because we are fast friends, and because 
you love and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both hands. Jack.” 

, As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle 
'holds the nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds : 

“You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous choris- 
ter and grinder of music — in his niche — may be troubled with 
some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, 
what shall we call^it ? ” 

“Yes, dear Jack.” 

“ And you will remember ? ” 

“ My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you 
have said with so much feeling ? ” 

“ Take it as a warning, then.” 

In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step 
back, Edwin pauses for an instant to consider the application of 
these last words. The instant over, he says, sensibly touched ; 

“ I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, 
and that my headpiece is none of the best. But I needn’t say I 
am young ; and perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older. 
At all events, I hope I have something impressible within me, 
which feels — deeply feels — the disinterestedness of your painfully 
laying your inner self bare, as a warning to me.” 

Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous 
that his breathing seems to have stopped. 

“I couldn’t fail to notice. Jack,, that it cost you a great effort, 
and that you were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self. 
Of course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I really 
was not prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me 
in that way.” 

Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the small- 
est stage of transition between the two extreme states, lifts his 
shoulders, laughs, and waves his right arm. 

“No ; don’t put the sentiment away. Jack ; please don’t ; for I 
am very much in earnest. I have no doubt that that unhealthy 
state of mind which you have so powerfully described is attended 
with some real suffering, and is hard to bear. But let me reassure 
you. Jack, as to the chances of its overcoming me. I don’t think 
I am in the way of it. In some few months less than another year, 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


349 


you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. 
I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy with me. And 
although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a certain un- 
avoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its end 
being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on 
capitally then, when it’s done and can’t be helped. In short. Jack, 
to go back to the old song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who 
knows old songs better than you ?), my wife shall dance, and I will 
sing, so merrily pass the day. Of Pussy’s being beautiful there 
cannot be a doubt ; — and when you are good besides, Little Miss 
Impudence,” once more apostrophising the portrait, ‘‘ I’ll burn your 
comic likeness, and paint your music-master another.” 

Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of 
musing benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every ani- 
mated look and gesture attending the delivery of these words. He 
remains in that attitude after they are spoken, as if in a kind of 
fascination attendant on his strong interest in the youthful spirit 
that he loves so well. Then he says with a quiet smile : 

“You won’t be warned, then 1 ” 

“ No, Jack.” 

“ You can’t be warned, then?” 

“No, Jack, not by you. Besides that I don’t really consider my- 
self in danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.” 

“ Shall we go and walk in the churchyard ? ” 

“ By all means. You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half 
a moment to the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there ? Only 
gloves for Pussy ; as many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. 
Rather poetical. Jack?” 

Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: “‘Nothing 
half so sweet in life,’ Ned ! ” 

“ Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket. They must be pre- 
sented to-night, or the poetry is gone. It’s against regulations for 
me to call at night, but not to^ leave a packet. I am ready, Jack! ” 

Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together. 


CHAPTER III. 

THE nuns’ house. 

For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as 
it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathe- 
dral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was 
once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly 


350 . THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to ^ 
the Normans by another ; and a name more or less in the course of 
many centuries can be of little moment to its dusty chronicles. 

An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any 
one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent 
city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its cathedral crypt, 
and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloister- 
ham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, 
and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars ; while every ploughman in 
its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Arch- 
bishops, Bishops, and such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the 
story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their 
bones to make his bread. 

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, 
with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes 
lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral 
to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So 
silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the 
smallest provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its 
shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind ; while the sun-browned 
tramps, who pass along and stare, quicken their limp a little, that 
they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive re- 
spectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that 
the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street 
by which you get into it and get out of it : the rest being mostly 
disappointing yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare — 
exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settle- 
ment, in colour and general conformation very like a Quakeress’s 
bonnet, up in a shady corner. 

In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, 
with its hoarse cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the 
Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far 
beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, 
convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively 
built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled 
notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. 

All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes 
in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an 
unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim and 
pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished sugar- 
tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books. 
The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing 
life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many 
gardens ; even its drooping and despondent little theatre has its 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


351 


poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he ducks from 
its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or oyster- 
shells, according to the season of the year. 

In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House : a vener- 
able brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived 
from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclos- 
ing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the 
legend : “ Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.” The 
house-front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining 
and staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative 
strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-glass 
stuck in his blind eye. 

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a 
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads 
to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many 
chambers of their House ; whether they sat in its long low windows 
telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making neck- 
laces of them for their adornment ; whether they were ever walled 
up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building for having 
some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which 
has kept the fermenting world alive ever since ; these may be 
matters of interest to its haunting ^ghosts (if any), but constitute 
no item in Miss Twinkleton’s half-yearly accounts. They are 
neither of Miss Twinkleton’s inclusive regulars, nor of her extras. 
The lady who undertakes the poetical department of the establish- 
ment at so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in her list of 
recitals bearing on such unprofitable questions. 

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal mag- 
netism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, 
but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were 
continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am 
drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so 
Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. 
Every night, the moment the young ladies have retired to rest, 
does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up 
her eyes a little, and become a sprightlier Miss Twinkleton than 
the young ladies have ever seen. Every night, at the same hour, 
does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night, com- 
prehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has 
no knowledge whatever by day, and references to a certain season 
at Tunbridge Wells (airily called by Miss Twinkleton in this state 
of her existence “ The Wells ”), notably the season wherein a cer- 
tain finished gentleman (compassionately called by Miss Twinkleton, 
in this stage of her existence, “ Foolish Mr. Porters ”) revealed a 


352 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


homage of the heart, whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic 
state of existence, is as ignorant as a granite pillar. Miss Twinkle- 
ton’s companion in both states of existence, and equally adaptable 
to either, is one Mrs. Tisher : a deferential widow with a weak back, 
a chronic sigh, and a suppressed voice, who looks after the young 
ladies’ wardrobes, and leads them to infer that she has seen better 
days. Perhaps this is the reason why it is an article of faith with 
the servants, handed down from race to race, that the departed 
Tisher was a hairdresser. 

The pet pupil of the Nuns’ House is Miss Rosa Bud, of course 
called Rosebud ; wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonder- 
fully whimsical. An awkward interest (awkward because romantic) 
attaches to Miss Bud in the minds of the young ladies, on account 
of its being known to them that a husband has been chosen for her 
by will and bequest, and that her guardian is bound down to bestow 
her on that husband when he comes of age. Miss Twinkleton, in 
her seminarial state of existence, has combated the romantic aspect 
of this destiny by affecting to shake her head over it behind Miss 
Bud’s dimpled shoulders, and to brood on the unhappy lot of that 
doomed little victim. But with no better effect — possibly some 
unfelt touch of foolish Mr. Porters has undermined the endeavour 
— than to evoke from the young ladies an unanimous bedchamber 
cry of “0, what a pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton is, my 
dear ! ” 

The Nuns’ House is never in such a state of flutter as when this 
allotted husband calls to see little Rosebud. (It is unanimously 
understood by the young ladies that he is lawfully entitled to this 
privilege, and that if Miss Twinkleton disputed it, she would be 
instantly taken up and transported.) When his ring at the gate- 
bell is expected, or takes place, every young lady who can, under 
any pretence, look out of window, looks out of window ; while every 
young lady who is “practising,” practises out of time; and the 
French class becomes so demoralised that the# mark goes round as 
briskly as the bottle at a convivial party in the last century. 

On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two 
at the gatehouse, the bell is rung with the usual fluttering 
results. 

“ Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.” 

This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief. Miss 
Twinkleton, with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to 
the sacrifice, and says : “You may go down, my dear.” Miss Bud 
goes down, followed by all eyek 

Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour : 
a dainty room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


353 


terrestrial and a celestial globe. These expressive machines imply 
(to parents and guardians) that even when Miss Twinkleton retires 
into the bosom of privacy, duty may at any moment compel her to 
become a sort of Wandering Jewess, scouring the earth and soaring 
through the skies in search of knowledge for her pupils. 

The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss 
Rosa is engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between 
the hinges of the open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles 
guiltily down the kitchen stairs, as a charming little apparition, 
with its face concealed by a little silk apron thrown over its head, 
glides into the parlour. 

“ 0 ! it is so ridiculous ! ” says the apparition, stopping and 
shrinking. “ Don’t, Eddy ! ” 

“ Don’t what, Rosa ? ” 

“ Don’t come any nearer, please. It is so absurd.” 

“ What is absurd, Rosa 1 ” 

“ The whole thing is. It is so absurd to be an engaged orphan , 
and it is so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling 
about after one, like mice in the wainscot ; and it is so absurd to 
be called upon ! ” 

The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its 
mouth while making this complaint. 

“You give me an affectionate reception. Pussy, I must say.” 

“ Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet. How 
are you V’ (very shortly.) 

“I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing 
you. Pussy, inasmuch as I see nothing of you.” 

This second remonstrance brings a dark bright pouting eye out 
from a corner of the apron ; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, 
as the apparition exclaims : “ O good gracious ! you have had half 
your hair cut off ! ” 

“I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I 
think,” says Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce 
glance at the looking-glass, and giving an impatient stamp. “ Shall 
I go?” 

“ No ; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy. The girls would all be 
asking questions why you went.” 

“ Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head 
of yours and give me a welcome ? ” 

The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies : 
“You’re very welcome, Eddy. There ! I’m sure that’s nice. Shake 
liands. No, I can’t kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop 
in my mouth.” 

“ Are you at all glad to see me. Pussy ? ” 


354 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ 0, yes, I’m dreadfully dad. — Go and sit down. — Miss 
Twinkleton.” 

It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, 
to appear every three minutes, either in her own person or in that 
of Mrs. Tisher, and lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by 
affecting to look for some desiderated article. On the present 
occasion Miss Twinkleton, gracefully gliding in and out, says in 
passing : “ How do you do, Mr. Drood ? Very glad indeed to 
have the pleasure. Pray excuse me. Tweezers. Thank you ! ” 

“ I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very 
much. They are beauties.” 

“ Well, that’s something,” the affianced replies, half grumbling. 
“ The smallest encouragement thankfully received. And how did 
you pass your birthday, Pussy ? ” 

“ Delightfully ! Everybody gave me a present. And we had a 
feast. And we had a ball at night.” 

“ A feast and a ball, eh ? These occasions seem to go off toler- 
ably well without me. Pussy.” 

“ De-lightfully ! ” cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, 
and without the least pretence of reserve. 

“ Hah ! And what was the feast ? ” 

“ Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.” 

“ Any partners at the ball ? ” 

“We danced with one another, of course, sir. But some of the 
girls made game to be their brothers. It ivas so droll ! ” 

“ Did anybody make game to be — ” 

“To be you ? 0 dear yes ! ” cries Rosa, laughing with great 

enjoyment. “ That was the first thing done.” 

“I hope she did it pretty well,” says Edwin rather doubtfully. 

“ 0, it was excellent ! — I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.” 

Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this : begs to know if 
he may take the liberty to ask why ? 

“ Because I was so tired of you,” returns Rosa. But she quickly 
adds, and pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face : “ Dear 
Eddy, you were just as tired of me, you know.” 

“ Did I say so, Rosa ? ” 

“Say so ! Do you ever say so? No, you only showed it. 0, 
she did it so well ! ” cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her coun- 
terfeit betrothed. 

“ It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,” says 
Edwin Drood. “And so. Pussy, you have passed your last birth- 
day in this old house.” 

“ Ah, yes ! ” Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and 
shakes her head. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


365 


“You seem to be sorry, Rosa.” 

“ I am sorry for the poor old place. Somehow, I feel as if it 
would miss me, when I am gone so far away, so young.” 

“ Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa ? ” 

She looks up at him with a swift bright look ; next moment 
shakes her head, sighs, and looks down again. 

“ That is to say, is it. Pussy, that we are both resigned ? ” 

She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly 
bursts out with : “You know we must be married, and married 
from here, Eddy, or the poor girls will be so dreadfully disap- 
pointed ! ” 

For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and 
for himself, in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love. 
He checks the look, and asks : “ Shall I take you out for a walk, 
Rosa dear ? ” 

Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, 
which has been comically reflective, brightens. “0, yes, Eddy; 
let us go for a walk ! And I tell you what we’ll do. You shall 
pretend that you are engaged to somebody else, and I’ll pretend 
that I am not engaged to anybody, and then we shan’t quarrel.” 

“Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?” 

“I know it will. Hush! Pretend to look out of window — 
Mrs. Tisher ! ” 

Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher 
heaves in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legen- 
dary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts : “I hope I see Mr. Drood 
well ; though I needn’t ask, if I may judge from his complexion. 
I trust I disturb no one ; but there loas a paper-knife — 0, thank 
you, I am sure ! ” and disappears with her prize. 

“One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,” says Rose- 
bud. “ The moment we get into the street, you must put me 
outside, and keep close to the house yourself — squeeze and graze 
yourself against it.” 

“ By all means, Rosa, if you wish it. Might I ask why ? ” 

“ 0 I because I don’t want the girls to see you.” 

“ It’s a flne day ; but would you like me to carry an umbrella 
up ?” 

“ Don’t be foolish, sir. You haven’t got polished leather boots 
on,” pouting, with one shoulder raised. 

“ Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they 
did see me,” remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a 
sudden distaste for them. 

“ Nothing escapes their notice, sir. And then I know what 
would happen. Some of them would begin reflecting on me by 


356 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DRGOD. 


saying (for they are free) that they never will on any account en- 
gage themselves to lovers without polished leather boots. Hark ! 
Miss Twinkleton. I’ll ask for leave.” 

That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of 
nobody in a blandly conversational tone as she advances : “ Eh ? 
Indeed ! Are you quite sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button- 
holder on the work-table in my room?” is at once solicited for 
walking leave, and graciously accords it. And soon the young 
couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all precautions against 
the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of Mr. Edwin Drood : 
precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of Mrs. Edwin 
Drood that is to be. 

“ Which way shall we take, Rosa ? ” 

Rosa replies : “I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.” 

“ To the — ?” 

“ A Turkish sweetmeat, sir. My gracious me, don’t you under- 
stand anything ? Call yourself an Engineer, and not know that ? ” 

“ Why, how should I know it, Rosa ? ” 

“ Because I am very fond of them. But 0 ! I forgot what we 
are to pretend. No, you needn’t know anything about them ; 
never mind.” 

So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where 
Rosa makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which 
he rather indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great 
zest : previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink 
gloves, like rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink 
fingers to her rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight 
that comes off the Lumps. 

“ Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend. And so you are 
engaged ? ” 

“And so I am engaged.” 

“ Is she nice ? ” 

“Charming.” 

“Tall?” 

“ Immensely tall ! ” Rosa being short. 

“ Must be gawky, I should think,” is Rosa’s quiet commentary. 

“ I beg your pardon ; not at all,” contradiction rising in him. 
“ What is termed a fine woman ; a splendid woman.” 

' “ Big nose, no doubt,” is the quiet commentary again. 

“Not a little one, certainly,” is the quick reply. (Rosa’s being 
a little one.) 

“ Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle. I know the 
sort of nose,” says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoy- 
ing the Lumps. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


357 


“ You donH know the sort of nose, Rosa,’’ with some warmth ; 
“because it’s nothing of the kind.” 

“Not a pale nose, Eddy ? ” 

“No.” Determined bot to assent. 

“A red nose? 0! I don’t like red noses. However; to be 
sure she can always powder it.” 

“ She would scorn to powder it,” says Edwin, becoming heated. 

“Would she? What a stupid thing she must be! Is she 
stupid in everything?” 

“ No ; in nothing.” 

After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not 
been unobservant of him, Rosa says : 

“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being 
carried off to Egypt ; does she, Eddy ? ” 

“ Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering 
skill : especially when they are to change the whole condition of 
an undeveloped country.” 

“ Lor I ” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh 
of wonder. 

“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his 
eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to 
her feeling that interest ? ” 

“ Object ? my dear Eddy I But really, doesn’t she hate boilers 
and things?” 

“ I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” 
he returns with angry emphasis ; “ though I cannot answer for her 
views about Things; really not understanding what Things are 
meant.” 

“ But don’t she hate Arabs, and Tur i;s, and Fellahs, and people ? ” 

“ Certainly not.” Very firmly. 

“ At least she must hate the Pyramids ? Come, Eddy ? ” 

“ Why should she be such a little — tall, I mean — goose, as to 
hate the Pyramids, Rosa ? ” 

“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her 
head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then 
you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds ! Isises, and 
Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses ; who cares about them ? 
And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the 
legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve 
him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite 
choked.” 

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, 
wander discontentedly about the old Close ; and each sometimes 
stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves. 


/ 


358 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Well ! ” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “ According to 
custom. We can’t get on, Rosa.” 

Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on. 

“ That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.” 

“ Considering what ? ” 

“ If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.” 

“Fow’ll go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.” 

“ Ungenerous ! I like that ! ” 

“ Then I donH like that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts. 

“Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who disparaged my profession, 
my destination — ” 

“You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope ? ” she 
interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never said you 
were. If you are, why haven’t you mentioned it to me ? I can’t 
find out your plans by instinct.” 

“ Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.” 

“Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed 
giantesses ? And she would, she would, she would, she would, 
she WOULD powder it ! ” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical 
contradictory spleen. 

“ Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,” 
says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned. 

“ How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when 
you’re always wrong ? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead ; — 
I’m sure I hope he is — and how can his legs or his chokes 
concern you?” 

“It is nearly time for your return, Rosa. We have not had a 
very happy walk, have we ^ ” 

“A happy walk? A detestably unhappy walk, sir. If I go 
up-stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing 
lesson, you are responsible, mind ! ” 

“ Let us be friends, Rosa.” 

“ Ah ! ” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real 
tears, “ I wish we could be friends ! It’s because we can’t be 
friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, 
Eddy, to have an old heartache ; but I really, really have, some- 
times. Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself too often. 
We should both of us have done better, if What is to be had been 
left What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing now, 
and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on 
our own account, and on the other’s ! ” 

Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt 
child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to 
involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood 



UNDER THE TREES 








360 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


stands watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both 
hands to the handkerchief at her eyes, and then — she becoming 
more composed, and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to 
laugh at herself for having been so moved — leads her to a seat 
hard by, under the elm-trees. 

“ One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever 
out of my own line — now I come to think of it, I don’t know 
that I am particularly clever in it — but I want to do right. 
There is not — there may be — I really don’t see my way to what 
I want to say, but I must say it before we part — there is not any 
other young — ” 

“0 no, Eddy ! It’s generous of you to ask me ; but no, no, 
no ! ” 

They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this 
moment the organ and the choir sound out sublimely. As they 
sit listening to the solemn swell, the confidence of last night 
rises in young Edwin Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike 
this music is to that discordance. 

“I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,” is his remark in a low 
tone in connection with the train of thought. 

“ Take me back at once, please,” urges his Affianced, quickly 
laying her light hand upon his wrist. “ They will all be coming out 
directly ; let us get away. 0, what a resounding chord ! But 
don’t let us stop to listen to it ; let us get away ! ” 

Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close. 
They go arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along 
the old High-street, to the Huns’ House. At the gate, the street 
being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rose- 
bud’s. 

She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again. 

“ Eddy, no ! I’m too sticky to be kissed. But give me your 
hand, and I’ll blow a kiss into that.” 

He does so. She breathes a light breath into it and asks, re- 
taining it and looking into it : — 

“ Now say, what do you see?” 

“See, Rosa?” 

“ Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and 
see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future ? ” 

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate 
opens, and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


361 


CHAPTER IV. 

MR. SAPSEA. 

Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity 
and conceit — a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, 
more conventional than fair — then the purest Jackass in Cloister- 
ham is Mr. Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer. 

Mr. Sapsea “ dresses at ” the Dean ; has been bowed to for the 
Dean, in mistake ; has even been spoken to in the street, as My 
Lord, under the impression that he was the Bishop come down 
unexpectedly, without his chaplain. Mr. Sapsea is very proud of 
this, and of his voice, and of his style. He has even (in selling 
landed property) tried the experiment of slightly intoning in his 
pulpit, to make himself more like what he takes to be the genuine 
ecclesiastical article. So, in ending a Sale by Pubhc Auction, Mr. 
Sapsea finishes off with an air of bestowing a benediction on the 
assembled brokers, which leaves the real Dean — a modest and 
worthy gentleman — far behind. 

Mr. Sapsea has many admirers ; indeed, the proposition is carried 
by a large local majority, even including non-believers in his wis- 
dom, that he is a credit to Cloisterham. He possesses the great 
qualities of being portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his 
speech, and another roll in his gait; not to mention a certain 
gravely flowing action with his hands, as if he were presently going 
to Confirm the individual with whom he holds discourse. Much 
nearer sixty years of age than fifty, with a flowing outline of 
stomach, and horizontal creases in his waistcoat; reputed to be 
rich ; voting at elections in the strictly respectable interest ; mor- 
ally satisfied that nothing but he himself has grown since he was 
a baby ; how can dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea be otherwise than 
a credit to Cloisterham, and society ? 

Mr. Sapsea’s premises are in the High-street, over against the 
Nuns’ House. They are of about the period of the Nuns’ House, 
irregularly modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating 
generations found, more and more, that they preferred air and 
light to Fever and the Plague. Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, 
about half life-size, representing Mr. Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig 
and toga, in the act of selling. The chastity of the idea, and the 
natural appearance of the little finger, hammer, and pulpit, have 
been much admired. 

Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first 
on his paved back yard ; and then on his railed-off garden. Mr. 
Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire — the 


362 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


fire is an early luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn 
evening — and is characteristically attended by his portrait, his 
eight-day clock, and his weather-glass. Characteristically, because 
he would uphold himself against mankind, his weather-glass against 
weather, and his clock against time. 

By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing 
materials. Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr. Sapsea reads 
it to himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room 
with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from 
memory : so internally, though with much dignity, that the word 
“ Ethelinda ” is alone audible. 

There are three clean wineglasses in a tray on the table. His 
serving-maid entering, and announcing “ Mr. Jasper is come, sir,” 
Mr. Sapsea waves “Admit him,” and draws two wineglasses from 
the rank, as being claimed. 

“ Glad to see you, sir. I congratulate myself on having the 
honour of receiving you here for the first time.” Mr. Sapsea does 
the honours of his house in this wise. . 

“You are very good. The honour is mine and the self-congratu- 
lation is mine.” 

“You are pleased to say so, sir. But I do assure you that it is a sat- 
isfaction to me to receive you in my humble home. And that is what 
I would not say to everybody.” Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea’s 
part accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be under- 
stood : “You will not easily believe that your society can be a 
satisfaction to a man like yourself ; nevertheless, it is.” 

“ I have for some time desired to know you, Mr. Sapsea.” 

“ And I, sir, have long known you by reputation as a man of 
taste. Let me fill your glass. I will give you, sir,” says Mr. Sap- 
sea, filling his own : 

“ When the French come over, 

May we meet them at Dover ! ” 

This was a patriotic toast in Mr. Sapsea’s infancy, and he is 
therefore fully convinced of its being appropriate to any subse- 
quent era. 

“You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr. Sapsea,” observes Jasper, 
watching the auctioneer with a smile as the latter stretches out 
his legs before the fire, “ that you know the world.” 

“ Well, sir,” is the chuckling reply, “ I think I know something 
of it ; something of it.” 

“ Your reputation for that knowledge has always interested and 
surprised me, and made me wish to know you. For Cloisterham 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


363 


is a little place. Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond 
it, and feel it to be a very little place.” 

“If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man,” Mr. 
Sapsea begins, and then stops : — “You will excuse me calling you 
young man, Mr. Jasper? You are much my junior.” 

“ By all means.” 

“ If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign 
countries have come to me. They have come to me in the way of 
business, and I have improved upon my opportunities. Put it 
that I take an inventory, or make a catalogue. I see a French 
clock. I never saw him before, in my life, but I instantly lay my 
finger on him and say ‘Paris!’ I see some cups and saucers of 
Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally : I put my finger 
on them, then and there, and I say ‘Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.’ 
It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and 
sandal-wood from the East Indies ; I put my finger on them all. I 
have put my finger on the North Pole before now, and said ‘ Spear 
of Esquimaux make, for half a pint of pale sherry ! ’ ” 

“ Really ? A very remarkable way, Mr. Sapsea, of acquiring a 
knowledge of men and things.” 

“ I mention it, sir,” Mr. Sapsea rejoins, with unspeakable com- 
placency, “because, as I say, it don’t do to boast of what you are; 
but show how you came to be it, and then you prove it.” 

“Most interesting. We were to speak of the late Mrs. Sapsea.” 

“We were, sir.” Mr. Sapsea fills both glasses, and takes the 
decanter into safe keeping again. “ Before I consult your opinion 
as a man of taste on this little trifle” — holding it up — “which 
is hut a trifle, and still has required some thought, sir, some little 
fever of the brow, I ought perhaps to describe the character of the 
late Mrs. Sapsea, now dead three-quarters of a year.” 

Mr. Jasper, in the act of yawning behind his wineglass, puts 
down that screen and calls up a look of interest. It is a little 
impaired in its expressiveness by his having a shut-up gape still to 
dispose of, with watering eyes. 

“Half a dozen years ago, or so,” Mr. Sapsea proceeds, “when I 
had enlarged my mind up to — I will not say to what it now is, 
for that might seem to aim at too much, but up to the pitch of 
wanting another mind to be absorbed in it — I cast my eye about 
me for a nuptial partner. Because, as I say, it is not good for man 
to be alone.” 

Mr. Jasper appears to commit this original idea to memory. 

“ Miss Brobity at that time kept, I will not call it the rival es- 
tablishment to the establishment at the Nuns’ House opposite, but 
I will call it the other parallel establishment down town. The 


364 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


world did have it that she showed a passion for attending my sales, 
when they took place on half holidays, or in vacation time. The 
world did put it about, that she admired my style. The world did 
notice that as time flowed by, my style became traceable in the 
dictation-exercises of Miss Brobity’s pupils. Young man, a whisper 
even sprang up in obscure malignity, that one ignorant and be- 
sotted Churl (a parent) so committed himself as to object to it by 
name. But I do not believe this. For is it likely that any human 
creature in his right senses would so lay himself open to be'pointed 
at, by what I call the finger of scorn ? ” 

Mr. Jasper shakes his head. Not in the least likely. Mr. Sap- 
sea, in a grandiloquent state of absence of mind, seems to refill his 
visitor’s glass, which is full already ; and does really refill his own, 
which is empty. 

“Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with 
homage to Mind. She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, 
precipitated, on an extensive knowledge of the world. When I 
made my proposal, she did me the honour to be so overshadowed 
with a species of Awe, as to be able to articulate only the two 
words, “ 0 Thou ! ” meaning myself. Her limpid blue eyes were 
fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together, 
pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to 
proceed, she never did proceed a word further. I disposed of the 
parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly 
one as could be expected under the circumstances. But she never 
could, and she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps- 
too-favourable estimate of my intellect. To the very last (feeble 
action of liver), she addressed me in the same unfinished terms.” 

Mr. Jasper has closed his eyes as the auctioneer has deepened his 
voice. He now abruptly opens them, and says, in unison with the 
deepened voice, “ Ah ! ” — rather as if stopping himself on the ex- 
treme verge of adding — “ men ! ” 

“I have been since,” says Mr. Sapsea, with his legs stretched 
out, and solemnly enjoying himself with the wine and the fire, 
“ what you behold me ; I have been since a solitary mourner ; I have 
been since, as I say, wasting my evening conversation on the desert 
air. I will not say that I have reproached myself ; but there have 
been times when I have asked myself the question : What if her 
husband had been nearer on a level with her 1 If she had not had 
to look up quite so high, what might the stimulating action have 
been upon the liver?” 

Mr. Jasper says, with an appearance of having fallen into dread- 
fully low spirits, that he “ supposes it was to be.” 

“We can only suppose so, sir,” Mr. Sapsea coincides, “ As I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


365 


say, Man proposes, Heaven disposes. It may or may not be put- 
ting the same thought in another form ; but that is the way I put 
it.” 


Mr. Jasper murmurs assent. 

“ And now, Mr. Jasper,” resumes the auctioneer, producing his 
scrap of manuscript, “ Mrs. Sapsea’s' monument having had full time 
to settle and dry, let me take your opinion, as a man of taste, on 
the inscription I have (as I before remarked, not without some little 
fever of the brow) drawn out for it. Take it in your own hand. 
The setting out of the lines requires to be followed with the eye, as 
well as the contents with the mind.” 

Mr. J asper complying, sees and reads as follows : 


ETHELINDA, 

Reverential Wife of 
MR. THOMAS SAPSEA, 
AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c. 

OF THIS CITY. 

Whose Knowledge of the World, 

Though somewhat extensive, 

Never brought him acquainted with 
A SPIRIT 
More capable of 

LOOKING UP TO HIM. 

STRANGER, PAUSE 
And ask thyself the Question, 

CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE? 

If Not, 

WITH A BLUSH RETIRE. 


Mr. Sapsea having risen and stationed himself with his back to 
the fire, for the purpose of observing the effect of these lines on the 
countenance of a man of taste, consequently has his face towards 
the door, when his serving-maid, again appearing, announces, “Dur- 
dles is come, sir ! ” He promptly draws forth and fills the third 
wineglass, as being now claimed, and replies, “ Show Hurdles in.” 

“ Admirable ! ” quoth Mr. Jasper, handing back the paper. 

“You approve, sir ? ” 

“ Impossible not to approve. Striking, characteristic, and 
complete.” 

The auctioneer inclines his head, as one accepting his due and 
giving a receipt ; and invites the entering Hurdles to take off that 
glass of wine (handing the same), for it will warm him. 

Hurdles is a stonemason; chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and 


366 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


monument way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot. No 
man is better known in Cloisterham. He is the chartered libertine 
of the place. Fame trumpets him a wonderful workman — which, 
for aught that anybody knows, he may be (as he never works) ; 
and a wonderful sot — which everybody knows he is. With the 
Cathedral crypt he is better acquainted than any living authority ; 
it may even be than any dead one. It is said that the intimacy 
of this acquaintance began in his habitually resorting to that secret 
place, to lock-out the Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off the 
fumes of liquor : he having ready access to the Cathedral, as con- 
tractor for rough repairs. Be this as it may, he does know much 
about it, and, in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, 
buttress, and pavement, has seen strange sights. He often speaks 
of himself in the third person ; perhaps, being a little misty as to 
his own identity, when he narrates ; perhaps, impartially adopting 
the Cloisterham nomenclature in reference to a character of acknowl- 
edged distinction. Thus he will say, touching his strange sights : 
“Durdles come upon the old chap,” in reference to a buried mag- 
nate of ancient time and high degree, “ by striking right into the 
coffin with his pick. The old chap gave Hurdles a look with his 
open eyes, as much as to say, ‘ Is your name Hurdles ? Why, my 
man, IVe been waiting for you a devil of a time ! ’ And then he 
turned to powder.” With a two-foot rule always in his pocket, 
and a mason’s hammer all but always in his hand. Hurdles goes 
continually sounding and tapping all about and about the Cathe- 
dral ; and whenever he says to Tope : “ Tope, here’s another old 
’un in here ! ” Tope announces it to the Hean as an established 
discovery. 

In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow necker- 
chief with draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than 
black, and laced boots of the hue of his stony calling. Hurdles leads 
a hazy, gipsy sort of life, carrying his dinner about with him in a 
small bundle, and sitting on all manner of tombstones to dine. 
This dinner of Hurdles’s has become quite a Cloisterham institu- 
tion : not only because of his never appearing in public without it, 
but because of its having been, on certain renowned occasions, taken 
into custody along with Hurdles (as drunk and incapable), and 
exhibited before the Bench of Justices at the townhall. These 
occasions, however, have been few and far apart ; Hurdles being 
as seldom drunk as sober. For the rest, he is an old bachelor, 
and he lives in a little antiquated hole of a house that was never 
finished : supposed to be built, so far, of stones stolen from the 
city wall. To this abode there is an approach, ankle-deep in 
stone chips, resembling a petrified grove of tombstones, urns, dra- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


367 


peries, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two 
journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who 
face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in 
and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical 
figures emblematical of Time and Death. 

To Durdles, when he had consumed his glass of port, Mr. Sapsea 
intrusts that precious effort of his Muse. Durdles unfeelingly 
takes out his two-foot rule, and measures the lines calmly, alloy- 
ing them with stone-grit. 

“ This is for the monument, is it, Mr. Sapsea 1 ” 

“ The Inscription. Yes.” Mr. Sapsea waits for its effect on a 
common mind. 

“It’ll come in to a eighth of a inch,” says Durdles. “Your 
servant, Mr. Jasper. Hope I see you well.” 

“ How are you, Durdles 1 ” 

“I’ve got a touch of the Tombatism on me, Mr. Jasper, but 
that I must expect.” 

“You mean the Rheumatism,” says Sapsea, in a sharp tone. 
(He is nettled by having his composition so mechanically received.) 

“No, I don’t. I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the Tombatism. It’s an- 
other sort from Rheumatism. Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles 
means. You get among them Tombs afore it’s well light on a 
winter morning, and keep on, as the Catechism says, a walking in 
the same all the days of your life, and you'll know what Durdles 
means.” 

“It is a bitter cold place,” Mr. Jasper assents, with an antip- 
athetic shiver. 

“ And if it’s bitter cold for you, up in the chancel, with a lot 
of live breath smoking out about you, what the bitterness is to 
Durdles, down in the crypt among the earthy damps there, and 
the dead breath of the old ’uns,” returns that individual, “Durdles 
leaves you to judge. — Is this to be put in hand at once, Mr. 
Sapsea ? ” 

Mr. Sapsea, with an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication, 
replies that it cannot be out of hand too soon. 

“ You had better let me have the key then,” says Durdles. 

“ Why, man, it is not to be put inside the monument ! ” 

“Durdles knows where it’s to be put, Mr. Sapsea; no man 
better. Ask ’ere a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows 
his work.” 

Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a drawer, unlocks an iron 
safe let into the wall, and takes from it another key. 

“When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no 
matter where, inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work 


368 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

all round, and see that his work is a doing him credit,” Durdles 
explains, doggedly. 

The key proffered him by the bereaved widower being a large 
one, he slips his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his flannel trou- 
sers made for it, and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and opens 
the mouth of a large breast-pocket within it before taking the 
key to place it in that repository. 

“Why, Durdles!” exclaims Jasper, looking on amused, “you 
are undermined with pockets ! ” 

“And I carries weight in ’em too, Mr. Jasper. Feel those!” 
producing two other large keys. 

“Hand me Mr. Sapsea’s likewise. Surely this is the heaviest 
of the three.” 

“You’ll find ’em much of a muchness, I expect,” says Durdles. 

“ They all belong to monuments. They all open Durdles’s work. 
Durdles keeps the keys of his work mostly. Not that they’re 
much used.” 

“ By-the-bye,” it comes into Jasper’s mind to say, as he idly 
examines the keys, “I have been going to ask you, many a day, 
and have always forgotten. You know they sometimes call you 
Stony Durdles, don’t you ? ” 

“ Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.” 

“ I am aware of that, of course. But the boys sometimes — ” 

“ 0 ! if you mind them young imps of boys — ” Durdles gruffly 
interrupts. 

“ I don’t mind them any more than you do. But there was a 
discussion the other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood 
for Tony ; ” clinking one key against another. 

(“ Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.”) 

“ Or whether Story stood for Stephen ; ” clinking with a change 
of keys. 

(“ You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em, Mr. Jasper.”) 

“ Or whether the name comes from your trade. How stands 
the fact ? ” 

Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts his head' 
from his idly stooping attitude over the fire, and delivers the keys 
to Durdles with an ingenuous and friendly face. 

But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that hazy state of 
his is always an uncertain state, highly conscious of its dignity, and 
prone to take offence. He drops his two keys back into his pocket 
one by one, and buttons them up ; he takes his dinner-bundle from 
the chair-back on which he hung it when he came in ; he distrib- 
utes the weight he carries, by tying the third key up in it, as though 
he were an Ostrich, and liked to dine off cold iron ; and he gets - 
out of the room, deigning no word of answer. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


369 


Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which, seasoned 
with his own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper 
of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty- 
late. Mr. Sapsea’s wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather 
of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended 
even then ; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for 
more of the precious commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea 
lets him off for the present, to ponder on the instalment he carries 
away. 


CHAPTER V. 

MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND. 

John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is brought 
to a stand-still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles, dinner-bundle 
and all, leaning his back against the iron railing of the burial-ground 
enclosing it from the old cloister-arches ; and a hideous small boy 
in rags flinging stones at him as a well-defined mark in the moon- 
light. Sometimes the stones hit him, and sometimes they miss him, 
but Durdles seems indifferent to either fortune. The hideous small 
boy, on the contrary, whenever he hits Durdles, blows a whistle of 
triumph through a jagged gap, convenient for the purpose, in the 
front of his mouth, where half his teeth are wanting ; and whenever 
he misses him, yelps out “ Mulled agin ! ” and tries to atone for the 
failure by taking a more correct and vicious aim. 

“What are you doing to the man?” demands Jasper, stepping 
out into the moonlight from the shade. 

“ Making a cock-shy of him,” replies the hideous small boy. 

“ Give me those stones in your hand.” 

“ Yes, I’ll give ’em you down your throat, if you come a ketching 
hold of me,” says the small boy, shaking himself loose, and back- 
ing. “ I’ll smash your eye, if you don’t look out ! ” 

“ Baby-Devil that you are, what has the man done to you ? ” 

“ He won’t go home.” 

“ What is that to you ? ” 

“ He gives me a ’apenny to pelt him home if I ketches him out 
too late,” says the boy. And then chants, like a little savage, half 
stumbling and half dancing among the rags and laces of his dilapi- 
dated boots : — 

“ Widdy widdy wen! 

I — ket — dies — Im — out — ar — ter — ten, 

Widdy widdy wy! 

Then — E — don’t — go — then — I — shy — 

Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning ! ” 

2 b * 


370 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


— with a comprehensive sweep on the last word, and one more 
delivery at Durdles. 

This would seem to be a poetical note of preparation, agreed 
upon, as a caution to Durdles to stand clear if he can, or to betake 
himself homeward. 

John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow 
him (feeling it hopeless to drag him, or coax him), and crosses to 
the iron railing where the Stony (and stoned) One is profoundly 
meditating. 

“ Do you know this thing, this child ? ” asked Jasper, at a loss 
for a word that will define this thing. 

“ Deputy,” says Durdles, with a nod. 

“ Is that its — his — name ? ” 

“Deputy,” assents Durdles. 

“ I’m man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works 
Garding,” this thing explains. “All us man-servants at Travel- 
lers’ Lodgings is named Deputy. When we’re chock full and the 
Travellers is all abed I come out for my ’elth.” Then with- 
drawing into the road, and taking aim, he resumes : — 

“ Widdy widdy wen! 

I — ket — ches — Im — out — ar — ter — ’ ’ 

“ Hold your hand,” cries Jasper, “ and don’t throw while I stand 
so near him, or I’ll kill you 1 Come, Durdles ; let me w^alk home 
with you to-night. Shall I carry your bundle ? ” 

“ Not on any account,” replies Durdles, adjusting it. “Durdles 
was making his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded 
by his works, like a poplar Author. — Your own brother-in-law;” 
introducing a sarcophagus within the railing, white and cold in the 
moonlight. “ Mrs. Sapsea ; ” introducing the monument of that 
devoted wife. “ Late Incumbent ; ” introducing the Reverend Gen- 
tleman’s broken column. “ Departed Assessed Taxes ; ” introducing 
a vase and towel, standing on what might represent the cake of 
soap. “ Former pastry cook and Muffin-maker, much respected ; ” 
introducing gravestone. “ All safe and sound here, sir, and all 
Durdles’s work. Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up 
in turf and brambles, the less said the better. A poor lot, soon 
forgot.” 

“ This creature. Deputy, is behind us,” says Jasper, looking back. 
“Is he to follow us ? ” 

The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious 
kind ; for, on Durdles’s turning himself about with the slow gravity 
of beery soddenness. Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the 
road and stands on the defensive. ' 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


371 


“You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,” 
says Durdles, unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury. 

• “ Yer lie, I did,” says Deputy, in his only form of polite con- 
tradiction. 

“Own brother, sir,” observes Durdles, turning himself about 
again, and as unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled 
or conceived it ; “ own brother to Peter the Wild Boy ! But I 
gave him an object in life.” 

“ At which he takes aim ? ” Mr. Jasper suggests. 

“That’s it, sir,” returns Durdles, quite satisfied; “at which he 
takes aim. I took him in hand and gave him an object. What 
was he before ? A destroyer. What work did he do ? Nothing 
but destruction. What did he earn by it ? Short terms in Clois- 
terham Jail. Not a person, not a piece of property, not a winder, 
not a horse, nor a dog, nor a. cat, nor a bird, nor a fowl, nor a 
pig, but what he stoned, for want of an enlightened object. I put 
that enlightened object before him, and now he can turn his honest 
halfpenny by the three penn’orth a week.” 

“ I wonder he has no competitors.” 

“ He has plenty, Mr. Jasper, but he stones ’em all away. Now, 
I don’t know what this scheme of mine comes to,” pursues Durdles, 
considering about it with the same sodden gravity; “ I don’t know 
what you may precisely call it. It ain’t a sort of a — scheme of 
a — - National Education ? ” 

“I should say not,” replies Jasper. 

“ / should say not,” assents Durdles ; “ then we won’t try to give 
it a name.” 

“ He still keeps behind us,” repeats Jasper, looking over his 
shoulder ; “ is he to follow us ? ” 

“We can’t help going round by the Travellers’ Twopenny, if 
we go the short way, which is the back way,” Durdles answers, 
“ and we’ll drop him there.” 

So they go on ; Deputy, as a rear rank one, taking open order, 
and invading the silence of the hour and place by stoning every 
wall, post, pillar, and other inanimate object, by the deserted way. 

“ Is there anything new down in the crypt, Durdles ? ” asks 
John Jasper. 

“Anything old, I think you mean,” growls Durdles. “It ain’t 
a spot for novelty.” 

“ Any new discovery on your part, I meant.” 

“ There’s a old ’un under the seventh pillar on the left as you 
go down the broken steps of the little underground chapel as 
formerly was ; I make him out (so fur as I’ve made him out yet) 
to be one of them old ’uns with a crook. To judge from the size 


372 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


of the passages in the walls, and of the steps and doors, by which 
they come and went, them crooks must have been a good deal in 
the way of the old ’uns ! Two on ’em meeting promiscuous must 
have hitched one another by the mitre pretty often, I should say.” 

Without any endeavour to correct the liberality of this opinion, 
Jasper surveys his companion — covered from head to foot with 
old mortar, lime, and stone grit — as though he, Jasper, were get- 
ting imbued with a romantic interest in his weird life. 

“Yours is a curious existence.” 

Without furnishing the least clue to the question, whether he 
receives this as a compliment or as quite the reverse, Durdles 
gruffly answers : “Yours is another.” 

“ Well ! inasmuch as my lot is cast in the same old earthy, 
chilly, never-changing place. Yes., But there is much more mystery 
and interest in your connection with the Cathedral than in mine. 
Indeed, I am beginning to have some idea of asking you to take 
me on as a sort of student, or free ’prentice, under you, and to let 
me go about with you sometimes, and see some of these odd nooks 
in which you pass your days.” 

The Stony One replies, in a general way, “All right. Every- 
body knows where to find Durdles, when he’s wanted.” Which, if 
not strictly true, is approximately so, if taken to express that 
Durdles may always be found in a state of vagabondage some- 
where. 

“What I dwell upon most,” says Jasper, pursuing his subject 
of romantic interest, “ is the remarkable accuracy with which you 
would seem to find out where people are buried. — What is the 
matter ? That bundle is in your way ; let me hold it.” 

Durdles has stopped and backed a little (Deputy, attentive to 
all his movements, immediately skirmishing into the road), and 
was looking about for some ledge or corner to place his bundle on, 
when thus relieved of it. 

“Just you give me my hammer out of that,” says Durdles, 
“ and I’ll show you.” 

Clink, clink. And his hammer is handed him. 

“Now, lookee here. You pitch your note, don’t you, Mr. 
Jasper ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“So I sound for mine. I take my hammer, and I tap.” 
(Here he strikes the pavement, and the attentive Deputy skir- 
mishes at a rather wider range, as supposing that his head may be 
in requisition.) I tap, tap, tap. Solid ! I go on tapping. Solid 
still ! Tap again. Holloa ! Hollow ! Tap again, persevering. 
Solid in hollow! Tap, tap, tap, to try it better. Solid in 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


373 


hollow ; and inside solid, hollow again ! There you are ! Old ’un 
crumbled away in stone cofl&n, in vault ! ” 

“ Astonishing ! ” 

“ I have even done this,” says Durdles, drawing out his two- 
foot rule (Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as suspecting that 
■ Treasure may be-ubout to be discovered, which may somehow lead 
to his own enrichment, and the delicious treat of the discoverers 
being hanged by the neck, on his evidence, until they are dead). 

“ Say that hammer of mine’s a wall — my work. Two ; four ; 
and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “ Six foot inside that 
wall is Mrs. Sapsea.” 

“Not really Mrs. Sapsea ? ” 

“ Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea. 
Durdles taps that wall represented by that hammer, and says, 
after good sounding : ‘ Something betwixt us ! ’ Sure enough, 
some rubbish has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s 
men ! ” 

Jasper opines that such accuracy “is a gift.” 

“I wouldn’t have it at a gift,” returns Durdles, by no means 
receiving the observation in good part. “ I worked it out for my- 
self Durdles comes by his knowledge through grubbing deep for 
it, and having it up by the roots when it don’t want to come. — 
Holloa you Deputy ! ” 

“ Widdy ! ” is Deputy’s shrill response, standing off again. 

“ Catch that ha’penny. And don’t let me see any more of you 
to-night, after we come to the Travellers’ Twopenny.” 

“ Warning ! ” returns Deputy, having caught the halfpenny, and 
appearing by this mystic word to express his assent to the arrange- 
ment. 

They have but to cross what was once the vineyard, belonging, 
to what was once the Monastery, to come into the narrow back lane v 
wherein stands the crazy wooden' house of two low stories currently 
known as the Travellers’ Twopenny ; — a house all warped and 
distorted, like the morals of the travellers, with scant remains of 
a lattice- work porch over the door, and also of a rustic fence before, 
its stamped-out garden ; by reason of the travellers being so bound 
to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so fond of having a fire 
by the roadside in the course of the day), that they can never be' 
persuaded or threatened into departure, without violently possess- 
ing themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing it off. 

The semblance of an inn is attempted to be given to this 
wretched place by fragments of conventional red curtaining in the 
windows, which rags are made muddily transparent in the night- 
season by feeble lights of rush or cotton dip burning dully in the 


374 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


close air of the inside. As Durdles and Jasper come near, they 
are addressed by an inscribed paper lantern over the door, setting 
forth the purport of the house. They are also addressed by some 
half-dozen other hideous small boys — whether twopenny lodgers 
or followers or hangers-on of such, who knows ! — who, as if at- 
tracted by some carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the 
moonlight, as Vultures might gather in the desert, and instantly 
fall to stoning him and one another. 

“Stop, you young brutes,” cries Jasper angrily, “and let us go 
by!” 

This remonstrance being received with yells and flying stones, 
according to a custom of late years comfortably established among 
police regulations of our English communities, where Christians are 
stoned on all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, 
Durdles remarks of the young savages, with some point, that 
“they haven’t got an object,” and leads the way down the lane. 

At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly enraged, checks his com- 
panion and looks back. All is silent. Next moment, a stone coming 
rattling at his hat, and a distant yell of “ Wake-Cock I Warning ! ” 
followed by a crow, as from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, 
apprising him under whose victorious Are he stands, he turns the 
corner into safety, and takes Durdles home : Durdles stumbling 
among the litter of his stony yard as if he w’ere going to turn head 
foremost into one of the unfinished tombs. 

John Jasper returns by another way to his gatehouse, and enter- 
ing softly with his key, finds his fire still burning. He takes from 
a locked press a peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills — but not with 
tobacco — and, having adjusted the contents of the bowl, very care- 
fully, with a little instrument, ascends an inner staircase of only a 
few steps, leading to two rooms. One of these is his own sleeping 
chamber : the other is his nephew’s. There is a light in each. 

His nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled. John Jasper 
stands looking down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his hand, for 
some time, with a fixed and deep attention. Then, hushing his 
footsteps, he passes to his own room, lights his pipe, and delivers 
himself to the Spectres it invokes at midnight. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


375 


CHAPTER VI. 

PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER. 

The Reverend Septimus Crisparkle (Septimus, because six little 
brother Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were 
born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were lighted), having 
broken the thin morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his ami- 
able head, much to the invigoration of his frame, was now assisting 
his circulation by boxing at a looking-glass with great science and 
prowess. A fresh and healthy portrait the looking-glass presented 
of the Reverend Septimus, feinting and dodging with the utmost 
artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder with the utmost* 
straightness, while his radiant features teemed with innocence, and 
soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing-gloves. 

It was scarcely breakfast-time yet, for Mrs. Crisparkle — mother, 
not wife of the Reverend Septimus — was only just down, and wait- 
ing for the urn. Indeed, the Reverend Septimus left off at this very 
moment to take the pretty old lady’s entering face between his box- 
ing-gloves and kiss it. Having done so with tenderness, the Rev- 
erend Septimus turned to again, countering with his left, and 
putting in his right, in a tremendous manner. 

“ I say, every morning of my life, that you’ll do it at last. Sept,” 
remarked the old lady, looking on ; “ and so you will.” 

“ Do what, Ma dear ? ” 

“ Break the pier-glass, or burst a blood-vessel.” 

“Neither, please God, Ma dear. Here’s wind, Ma. Look at 
this ! ” 

In a concluding round of great severity, the Reverend Septimus 
administered and escaped all sorts of punishment, and wound up 
by getting the old lady’s cap into Chancery — such is the technical 
term used in scientific circles by the learned in the Noble Art — 
with a lightness of touch that hardly stirred the lightest lavender 
or cherry riband on it. Magnanimously releasing the defeated, just 
in time to get his gloves into a drawer and feign to be looking out 
of window in a contemplative state of mind when a servant entered, 
the Reverend Septimus then gave place to the urn and other prep- 
arations for breakfast. These completed, and the two alone again, 
it was pleasant to see (or would have been, if there had been any 
one to see it, which there never was), the old lady standing to say 
the Lord’s Prayer aloud, and her son. Minor Canon nevertheless, 
standing with bent head to hear it, he being within five years of 
forty : much as he had stood to hear the same words from the same 
lips when he was within five months of four. 


376 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


What is prettier than an old lady — except a young lady — 
when her eyes are bright, when her figure is trim and compact, 
when her face is cheerful and calm, when her dress is as the dress 
of a china shepherdess : so dainty in its colours, so individually as- 
sorted to herself, so neatly moulded on her? Nothing is prettier, 
thought the good Minor Canon frequently, when taking his seat at 
table opposite his long-widowed mother. Her thought at such times 
may be condensed into the two words that oftenest did duty to- 
gether in all her conversations : “ My Sept ! ” 

They were a good pair to sit breakfasting together in Minor 
Canon Corner, Cloisterham. For Minor Canon Corner was a quiet 
place in the shadow of the Cathedral, which the cawing of the 
. rooks, the echoing footsteps of rare passers, the sound of the Cathe- 
dral bell, or the roll of the Cathedral organ, seemed to render more 
quiet than absolute silence. Swaggering fighting men had had their 
centuries of ramping and raving about Minor Canon Corner, and 
beaten serfs had had their centuries of drudging and dying there, 
and powerful monks had had their centuries of being sometimes 
useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were all gone 
out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one 
of the highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there 
might be left behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded 
Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of the mind 
— productive for the most part of pity and forbearance — which is 
engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play 
that is played out. 

Red-brick walls harmoniously toned down in colour by time, 
strong-rooted ivy, latticed windows, panelled rooms, big oaken 
beams in little places, and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit 
yet ripened upon monkish trees, were the principal surroundings of 
pretty old Mrs. Crisparkle and the Reverend Septimus as they sat 
at breakfast. 

“And what, Ma dear,” inquired the Minor Canon, giving proof 
of a wholesome and vigorous appetite, “ does the letter say ? ” 

The pretty old lady, after reading it, had just laid it down upon 
the breakfast-cloth. She handed it over to her son. 

Now, the old lady was exceedingly proud of her bright eyes being 
so clear that she could read writing without spectacles. Her son 
was also so proud of the circumstance, and so dutifully bent on her 
deriving the utmost possible gratification from it, that he had in- 
vented the pretence that he himself could not read writing without 
spectacles. Therefore he now assumed a pair, of grave and prodig- 
ious proportions, which not only seriously inconvenienced his nose 
and his breakfast, but seriously impeded his perusal of the letter. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


377 


For, he had the eyes of a microscope and a telescope combined, 
when they were unassisted. 

“It’s from Mr. Honey thunder, of course,” said the old lady, 
folding her arms. 

“ Of course,” assented her son. He then lamely read on : 


“ ‘Haven of Philanthropy, 

“ ‘ Chief Ofl&ces, London, Wednesday. 

“ ‘ Dear Madam, 

“ ‘ I write in the — ; ’ In the what’s this 1 What does he write 
in ? ” 

“In the chair,” said the old lady. 

The Reverend Septimus took off his spectacles, that he might 
see her face, as he exclaimed : 

“Why, what should he write in?” 

“Bless me, bless me. Sept,” returned the old lady, “you don’t 
see the context ! Give it back to me, my dear.” 

Glad to get his spectacles off (for they always made his eyes 
water), her son obeyed : murmuring that his sight for reading 
manuscript got worse and worse daily. 

“ ‘ I write,’ ” his mother went on, reading very perspicuously 
and precisely, “ ‘ from the chair, to which I shall probably be con- 
fined for some hours.’ ” 

Septimus looked at the row of chairs against the wall, with a 
half-protesting and half-appealing countenance. 

“ ‘ We have,’ ” the old lady read on with a little extra emphasis, 
“ ‘ a meeting of our Convened Chief Composite Committee of Cen- 
tral and District Philanthropists, at our Head Haven as above ; 
and it is their unanimous pleasure that I take the chair.’ ” 

Septimus breathed more freely, and muttered : “ 0 ! if he comes 
to that, let him.” 

“ ‘ Not to lose a day’s post, I take the opportunity of a long 
report being read, denouncing a public miscreant — ’ ” 

“It is a most extraordinary thing,” interposed the gentle Minor 
Canon, iaying down his knife and fork to rub his ear in a vexed 
manner, “ that these Philanthropists are always denouncing some- 
body. And it is another most extraordinary thing that they are 
always so violently flush of miscreants ! ” 

“ ‘ Denouncing a public miscreant ! ’ ” — the old lady resumed, 
“ ‘ to get our little affair of business off my mind. I have spoken 
with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject 
of their defective education, and they give in to the plan proposed ; 
as I should have taken good care they did, whether they liked it 
or not.’ ” 


378 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ And it is another most extraordinary thing,” remarked the 
Minor Canon in the same tone as before, “that these philanthro- 
pists are so given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of 
the neck, and (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of 
peace. — I beg your pardon, Ma dear, for interrupting.” 

“ ‘ Therefore, dear Madam, you will please prepare your son, the 
Rev. Mr. Septimus, to expect Neville as an inmate to be read with, 
on Monday next. On the same day Helena will accompany him 
to Cloisterham, to take up her quarters at the Nuns’ House, the 
establishment recommended by yourself and son jointly. Please 
likewise to prepare for her reception and tuition there. The terms 
in both cases are understood to be exactly as stated to me in writ- 
ing by yourself, when I opened a correspondence with you on this 
subject, after the honour of being introduced to you at your sister’s 
house in town here. With compliments to the Rev. Mr. Septimus, 
I am. Dear Madam, Your affectionate brother (In Philanthropy), 
Luke Honeythunder.’ ” 

“Well, Ma,” said Septimus, after a little more rubbing of his 
ear, “we must try it. There can be no doubt that we have room 
for an inmate, and that I have time to bestow upon him, and in- 
clination too. I must confess to feeling rather glad that he is not 
Mr. Honeythunder himself. Though that seems wretchedly preju- 
diced — does it not ? — for I never saw him. Is he a large man, 
Ma?” 

“ I should call him a large man, my dear,” the old lady replied 
after some hesitation, “but that his voice is so much larger.” 

“ Than himself?” 

“ Than anybody.” 

“ Hah ! ” said Septimus. And finished his breakfast as if the 
flavour of the Superior Family Souchong, and also of the ham and 
toast and eggs, were a little on the wane. 

Mrs. Crisparkle’s sister, another piece of Dresden china, and 
matching her so neatly that they would have made a delightful 
pair of ornaments for the two ends of any capacious old-fashioned 
chimneypiece, and by right should never have been seen apart, was 
the childless wife of a clergyman holding Corporation preferment 
in London City. Mr. Honeythunder in his public character of 
Professor of Philanthropy had come to know Mrs. Crisparkle 
during the last rematching of the china ornaments (in other words, 
during her last annual visit to her sister), after a public occasion 
of a philanthropic nature, when certain devoted orphans of tender 
years had been glutted with plum buns, and plump bumptiousness. 
These were all the antecedents known in Minor Canon Corner of 
the coming pupils. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


379 


“ I am sure you will agree with me, Ma,” said Mr. Crisparkle, 
after thinking the matter over, “ that the first thing to be done, 
is, to put these young people as much at their ease as possible. 
There is nothing disinterested in the notion, because we cannot 
be at our ease with them unless they are at their ease with us. 
Now, Jasper’s nephew is down here at present; and like takes to 
like, and youth takes to youth. He is a cordial young fellow, and 
we will have him to meet the brother and sister at dinner. That’s 
three. We can’t think of asking him, without asking Jasper. 
That’s four. Add Miss Twinkleton and the fairy bride that is to 
be, and that’s six. Add our two selves, and that’s eight. Would 
eight at a friendly dinner at all put you out, Ma ? ” 

“Nine would. Sept,” returned the old lady, visibly nervous. 

“My dear Ma, I particularise eight.” 

“ The exact size of the table and the room, my dear.” 

So it was settled that way; and when Mr. Crisparkle called ‘ 
with his mother upon Miss Twinkleton, to arrange for the recep- 
tion of Miss Helena Landless at the Nuns’ House, the two other 
invitations having reference to that establishment were proffered 
and accepted. Miss Twinkleton did, indeed, glance at the globes, 
as regretting that they were not formed to be taken out into 
society ; but became reconciled to leaving them behind. Instruc- 
tions were then despatched to the Philanthropist for the departure 
and arrival, in good time for dinner, of Mr. Neville and Miss 
Helena ; and stock for soup became fragrant in the air of Minor 
Canon Corner. 

In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. 
Sapsea said there never would be. Mr. Sapsea said more ; he said 
there never should be. And yet, marvellous to consider, it has 
come to pass, in these days, that Express Trains don’t think 
Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell and whirl through it on 
their larger errands, casting the dust off their wheels as a testi- 
mony against its insignificance. Some remote fragment of Main 
Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the 
Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, 
and (of course), the Constitution, whether or no ; but even that 
had already so unsettled Cloisterham traffic, that the traffic, desert- 
ing the high road, came sneaking in from an unprecedented part of 
the,^untry by a back stable-way, for many years labelled at the 
corner : “ Beware of the Dog.” 

To this ignominious avenue of approach, Mr. Crisparkle repaired, 
awaiting the arrival of a short squat omnibus, with a disproportion- 
ate heap of luggage on the roof — like a little Elephant with infi- 
nitely too much Castle — which was then the daily service between 


380 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


Cloisterham and external mankind. As this vehicle lumbered up, 
Mr. Crisparkle could hardly see anything else of it for a large out- 
side passenger seated on the box, with his elbows squared, and his 
hands on his knees, compressing the driver into a most uncomfort- 
ably small compass, and glowering about him with a strongly- 
marked face. 

“ Is this Cloisterham ? ” demanded the passenger, in a tremen- 
dous voice. 

“ It is,” replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after 
throwing the reins to the ostler. “ And I never was so glad to 
see it.” 

“ Tell your master to make his box-seat wider, then,” returned 
the passenger. “ Your master is morally bound — and ought to 
be legally, under ruinous penalties — to provide for the comfort of 
his fellow-man.” 

The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial 
perquisition into the state of his skeleton ; which seemed to make 
him anxious. 

“ Have I sat upon you ? ” asked the passenger. 

“You have,” said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all. 

“ Take that card, my friend.” 

“ I think I won’t deprive you on it,” returned the driver, casting 
his eyes over it with no great favour, without taking it. “ What’s 
the good of it to me ? ” 

“ Be a Member of that Society,” said the passenger. 

“ What shall I get by it ? ” asked the driver. 

“Brotherhood,” returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice. 

“ Thankee,” said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down ; 
“my mother was contented with myself, and so am I. I don’t 
want no brothers.” 

“ But you must have them,” replied the passenger, also descend-^ 
ing, “ whether you like it or not. I am your brother.” 

“ I say ! ” expostulated the driver, becoming more chafed in 
temper, “not too fur! The worm will^ when — ” 

But here Mr. Crisparkle interposed, remonstrating aside, in a 
friendly voice : “ Joe, Joe, Joe 1 don’t forget yourself, Joe, my good 
fellow ! ” and then, when Joe peaceably touched his hat, accosting 
the passenger with : “Mr. Honey thunder ? ” 

“ That is my name, sir.” ^ 

“ My name is Crisparkle.” 

“ Reverend Mr. Septimus % Glad to see you, sir. Neville and 
Helena are inside. Having a little succumbed of late, under the 
pressure of my public labours, I thought I would take a mouthful 
of fresh air, and come down with them, and return at night. So 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


381 


you are the Reverend Mr. Septimus, are you ? ” surveying him on 
the whole with disappointment, and twisting a double eyeglass by 
its riband, as if he were roasting it, but not otherwise using it. 
“Hah ! I expected to see you older, sir.” 

“ I hope you will,” was the good-humoured reply. 

“Eh?” demanded Mr. Honey thunder. 

“ Only a poor little joke. Not worth repeating.” 

“ J oke ? Ay ; I never see a joke,” Mr. Honey thunder frowningly 
retorted. “A joke is wasted upon me, sir. W'here are they? 
Helena and Neville, come here ! Mr. Crisparkle has come down 
to meet you.” 

An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually 
handsome lithe girl ; much alike ; both very dark, and very rich 
in colour ; she of almost the gipsy type ; something untamed about 
them both ; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress ; yet 
withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than 
the followers. Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb ; half shy, 
half defiant fierce of look ; an indefinable kind of pause coming 
and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which 
might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound. 
The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr. 
Crisparkle would have read thus, verbatim. 

He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner, with a troubled mind 
(for the discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess lay heavy 
on it), and gave his arm to Helena Landless. Both she and her 
brother, as they walked all together through the ancient streets, 
took great delight in what he pointed out of the Cathedral and 
the Monastery ruin, and wondered — so his notes ran on — much as 
if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild 
tropical dominion. Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle of 
the road, shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly de- 
veloping a scheme he had, for making a raid on all the unemployed 
persons in the United Kingdom, laying them every one % the 
heels in jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt extermination, 
to become philanthropists. 

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy 
when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the 
little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the 
face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory 
Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, 
as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that 
he called aloud to his fellow-creatures : “ Curse your souls and 
bodies, come here and be blessed ! ” still his philanthropy was of 
that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and ani- 


382 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


mosity was hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, 
but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done 
their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot 
them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by 
making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as 
the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, 
but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, 
jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were 
to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the 
people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. 
You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite 
interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and 
calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you were to 
do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go 
to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name 
down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you 
were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and 
your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a plat- 
form, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what 
the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the 
Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what the 
Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was 
usually said in the unanimously carried resolution under hand and 
seal, to the effect : “ That this assembled Body of Professing Phi- 
lanthropists views, with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed 
with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence” — in short, the 
baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself 
to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, 
without being at all particular as to facts. 

The dinner was a most doleful breakdown. The philanthropist 
deranged the symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the 
waiting, blocked up the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who 
assisted the parlour-maid) to the verge of distraction by passing 
plates and dishes on, over his own head. Nobody could talk to 
anybody, because he held forth to everybody at once, as if the 
company had no individual existence, but were a Meeting. He 
impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official personage to 
be addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical hat on, 
and fell into the exasperating habit, common among such orators, 
of impersonating him as a wicked and weak opponent. Thus, he 
would ask : “ And will you, sir, now stultify yourself by telling 
me ” — and so forth, when the innocent man had not opened his 
lips, nor meant to open them. Or he would say ; “Now see, sir, 
to what a position you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


383 


After exhausting all the resources of fraud and falsehood, during 
years upon years j after exhibiting a combination of dastardly 
meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world has not often 
witnessed ; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before 
the most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for 
mercy ! ” Whereat the unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in 
part indignant and in part perplexed ; while his worthy mother 
sat bridling, with tears in her eyes, and the remainder of the party 
lapsed into a sort of gelatinous state, in which there was no flavour 
or solidity, and very little resistance. 

But the gush of philanthropy that burst forth when the depart- 
ure of Mr. Honeythunder began to impend, must have been highly 
gratifying to the feelings of that distinguished man. His coffee 
was produced, by the special activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour be- 
fore he wanted it. Mr. Crisparkle sat with his watch in his hand 
for about the same period, lest he should overstay his time. The 
four young people were unanimous in believing that the Cathedral 
clock struck three-quarters, when it actually struck but one. Miss 
Twinkleton estimated the distance to the omnibus at flve-and- 
twenty minutes’ walk, when it was really five. The affectionate 
kindness of the whole circle hustled him into his greatcoat, and 
shoved him out into the moonlight, as if he were a fugitive traitor 
with whom they sympathised, and a troop of horse were at the 
back door. Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge, who took him to 
the omnibus, were so fervent in their apprehensions of his catching 
cold, that they shut him up in it instantly and left him, with still 
half-an-hour to spare. 


CHAPTER VII. 

MOEE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE. 

“I KNOW very little of that gentleman, sir,” said Neville to the 
Minor Canon as they turned back. 

“You know very little of your guardian?” the Minor Canon 
repeated. 

“ Almost nothing ! ” 

“ How came he — ” 

“ To my guardian ? I’ll tell you, sir. I suppose you know 
that we come (my sister and I) from Ceylon ? ” 

“Indeed, no.” 

“ I wonder at that. We Ijved with a stepfather there. Our 
mother died there, when we were little children. We have had a 
wretched existence. She made him our guardian, and he was a 


384 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat, and clothes to wear. 
At his death, he passed us over to this man ; for no better reason 
that I know of, than his being a friend or connection of his, whose 
name was always in print and catching his attention.” 

“ That was lately, I suppose ? ” 

“Quite lately, sir. This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute 
as well as a grinding one. It is well he died when he did, or I 
might have killed him.” 

Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at 
his hopeful pupil in consternation. 

“I surprise you, sir?” he said, with a quick change to a sub- 
missive manner. 

“You shock me; unspeakably shock me.” 

The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, 
and then said : “You never saw him beat your sister. I have 
seen him beat mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot 
it.” 

“Nothing,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “not even a beloved and beau- 
tiful sister’s tears under dastardly ill-usage ; ” he became less severe, 
in spite of himself, as his indignation rose; “could justify those 
horrible expressions that you used.” 

“ I am sorry I used them, and especially to you, sir. I beg to 
recall them. But permit me to set you right on one point. You 
spoke of my sister’s tears. My sister would have let him tear 
her to pieces, before she would have let him believe that he could 
make her shed a tear.” 

Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental notes of his, and was 
neither at all surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed to question 
it. 

“ Perhaps you will think it strange, sir,” — this was said in a 
hesitating voice — “that I should so soon ask you to allow me to 
confide in you, and to have the kindness to hear a word or two 
from me in my defence ? ” 

“Defence?” Mr. Crisparkle repeated. “You are not on your 
defence, Mr. Neville.” 

“ I think I am, sir. At least I know I should be, if you were 
better acquainted with my character.” 

“Well, Mr. Neville,” was the rejoinder. “What if you leave 
me to find it out ? ” 

“Since it is your pleasure, sir,” answered the young man, with 
a quick change in his manner to sullen disappointment : “since it 
is your pleasure to check me in my impulse, I must submit.” 

There was that in the tone of this short speech which made the 
conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy. It hinted 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


385 


to him that he might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness 
beneficial to a misshapen young mind and perhaps to his own 
power of directing and improving it. They were within sight of 
the lights in his windows, and he stopped. 

“Let us turn back and take a turn or two up and down, Mr. 
Neville, or you may not have time to fiuish what you wish to say 
to me. You are hasty in thinking that I mean to check you. 
Quite the contrary. I invite your confidence.” 

“You have invited it, sir, without knowing it, ever since I 
came here. I say ‘ ever since,’ as if I had been here a week. The 
truth is, we came here (my sister and I) to quarrel with you, and 
affront you, and break away again.” 

“ Really ? ” said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead loss for anything else 
to say. 

“You see, we could not know what you were beforehand, sir; 
could we h ” 

“Clearly not,”. said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“And having liked no one else with whom we have ever been 
brought into contact, we had made up our minds not to like 
you.” 

“Really'?” said Mr. Crisparkle again. 

“ But we do like you, sir, and we see an unmistakable difference 
between your house and your reception of us, and anything else 
we have ever known. This — and my happening to be alone with 
you — and everything around us seeming so quiet and peaceful 
after Mr. Honeythunder’s departure — and Cloisterham being so 
old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining on it — these 
things inclined me to open my heart.” 

“I quite understand, Mr. Neville. And it is salutary to listen 
to such influences.” 

“ In describing my own imperfections, sir, I must ask you not 
to suppose that I am describing my sister’s. She has come out of 
the disadvantages of our miserable life, as much better than I am, 
as that Cathedral tower is higher than those chimneys.” 

Mr. Crisparkle in his own breast was not so sure of this. 

“ I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a 
deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. 

I have been always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. 
This has driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false 
and mean. I have been stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, 
the very necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, 
the commonest possessions of youth. This has caused me to be 
utterly wanting in I don’t know what emotions, or remembrances, 
or good instincts — I have not even a name for the thing, you see ! 

' 2 c 


386 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

— that you have had to work upon in other young men to whom 
you have been accustomed.” 

“ This is evidently true. But this is not encouraging,” thought 
Mr. Crisparkle as they turned again. 

“ And to finish with, sir : I have been brought up among abject 
and servile dependents, of an inferior race, and I may easily have 
contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes, I don’t know but 
that it may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood.” 

“As in the case of that remark just now,” thought Mr. Cri- 
sparkle. 

“ In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin chil- 
dren), you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery 
ever subdued her, though it often cowed me. When we ran away 
from it (we ran away four times in six years, to be soon brought 
back and cruelly punished), the fight was always of her planning 
and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the 
daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first 
decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with 
which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she 
tried to tear it out, or bite it off. I have tiothing further to say, 
sir, except that I hope you will bear with me and make allowance 
for me.” 

“ Of that, Mr. Neville, you may be sure,” returned the Minor 
Canon. “ I don’t preach more than I can help, and I will not 
repay your confidence with a sermon. But I entreat you to bear 
in mind, very seriously and steadily, that if I am to do you any 
good, it can only be with your own assistance ; and that you can 
only render that, efficiently, by seeking aid from Heaven.” 

“ I will try to do my part, sir.” 

“ And, Mr. Neville, I will try to do mine. Here is my hand 
on it. May God bless our endeavours ! ” 

They were now standing at his house-door, and a cheerful sound 
of voices and laughter was heard within. 

“We will take one more turn before going in,” said Mr. Cri- 
sparkle, “for I want to ask you a question. When you said you 
were in a changed mind concerning me, you spoke, not only for 
yourself, but for your sister too ? ” 

“ Undoubtedly I did, sir.” 

“ Excuse me, Mr. Neville, but I think you have had no oppor- 
tunity of communicating with your sister, since I met you. Mr. 
Honeythunder was very eloquent ; but perhaps I may venture to 
say, without ill-nature, that he rather monopolised the occasion. 
May you not have answered for your sister without sufficient 
warrant ? ” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


387 


Neville shook his head with 'a proud smile. 

“You don’t know, sir, yet, what a complete understanding can 
exist between my sister and me, though no spoken word — perhaps 
hardly as much as a look — may have passed between us. She 
not only feels as I have described, but she very well knows that 
I am taking this opportunity of speaking to you, both for her and 
for myself.” 

Mr. Crisparkle looked in his face, with some incredulity; but 
his face expressed such absolute and firm conviction of the truth 
of what he said, that Mr. Crisparkle looked at the pavement, and 
mused, until they came to his door again. 

“ I will ask for one more turn, sir, this time,” said the young 
man, with a rather heightened colour rising in his face. “But 
for Mr. Honeythunder’s — I think you called it eloquence, sir?” 
(somewhat slyly.) 

“I — yes, I called it eloquence,” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ But for Mr. Honeythunder’s eloquence, I might have had no 
need to ask you what I am going to ask you. This Mr. Edwin 
Drood, sir : I think that’s the name ? ” 

“ Quite correct,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “ D-r-double o-d.” 

“Does he — or did he — read with you, sir?” 

“ Never, Mr. Neville. He comes here visiting his relation, Mr. 
Jasper.” 

“Is Miss Bud his relation too, sir?” 

(“ Now, why should he ask that, with sudden superciliousness?” 
thought Mr. Crisparkle.) Then he explained, aloud, what he knew 
of the little story of their betrothal. 

“ 0 ! that’s it, is it ? ” said the young man. “ I understand 
his air of proprietorship now ! ” 

This was said so evidently to himself, or to anybody rather than 
Mr. Crisparkle, that the latter instinctively felt as if to notice it 
would be almost tantamount to noticing a passage in a letter which 
he had read by chance over the writer’s shoulder. A moment 
afterwards they re-entered the house. 

Mr. Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his draw- 
ing-room, and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang. It 
was a consequence of his playing the accompaniment without notes, 
and of her being a heedless little creature, very apt to go wrong, 
that he followed her lips most attentively, with his eyes as well as 
hands ; carefully and softly hinting the key-note from time to time. 
Standing with an arm drawn round her, but with a face far more 
intent on Mr. Jasper than on her singing, stood Helena, between 
whom and her brother an instantaneous recognition passed, in which 
Mr. Crisparkle saw, or thought he saw, the understanding that 


388 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


had been spoken of, flash out. Mr. Neville then took his admir- 
ing station, leaning against the piano, opposite the singer ; Mr. 
Crisparkle sat down by the china shepherdess ; Edwin Drood gal- 
lantly furled and unfurled Miss Twinkleton’s fan ; and that lady 
passively claimed that sort of exhibitor’s proprietorship in the ac- 
complishment on view, which Mr. Tope, the Verger, daily claimed 
in the Cathedral service. 

The song went on. It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and 
the fresh young voice was very plaintive and tender. As Jasper 
watched the pretty lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, 
as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became 
less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, 
and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes : “I can’t bear 
this ! I am frightened ! Take me away ! ” 

With one swift turn of her lithe figure, Helena laid the little 
beauty on a sofa, as if she had never caught her up. Then, on 
one knee beside her, and with one hand upon her rosy mouth, while 
with the other she appealed to all the rest, Helena said to them : 
“ It’s nothing ; it’s all over ; don’t speak to her for one minute, 
and she is well ! ” 

Jasper’s hands had, in the same instant, lifted themselves from 
the keys, and were now poised above them, as though he waited 
to resume. In that attitude he yet sat quiet : not even looking 
round, when all the rest had changed their places and were reassur- 
ing one another. 

“ Pussy’s not used to an audience ; that’s the fact,” said Edwin 
Drood. “She got nervous, and couldn’t hold out. Besides, Jack, 
you are such a conscientious master, and require so much, that I 
believe you make her afraid of you. No wonder.” 

“No wonder,” repeated Helena. 

“ There, Jack, you hear ! You would be afraid of him, under 
similar circumstances, wouldn’t you. Miss Landless ? ” 

“Not under any circumstances,” returned Helena. 

Jasper brought down his hands, looked over his shoulder, and 
begged to thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character. 
Then he fell to dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while 
his little pupil was taken to an open window for air, and was other- 
wise petted and restored. When she was brought back, his place 
was empty. “Jack’s gone. Pussy,” Edwin told her. “I am more 
than half afraid he didn’t like to be charged with being the Monster 
who had frightened you.” But she answered never a word, and 
shivered, as if they had made her a little too cold. 

Miss Twinkleton now opining that indeed these were late hours, 
Mrs. Crisparkle, for finding ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns’ 



/ 


AT TIIK PIANO. 





390 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


House, and that we who undertook the formation of the future 
wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as 
requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound 
(voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish 
habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cav- 
aliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and 
the gate of the Nuns’ House closed upon them. 

The boarders had retired, and only Mrs. Tisher in solitary vigil 
awaited the new pupil. Her bedroom being within Rosa’s, very 
little introduction or explanation was necessary, before she was 
placed in charge of her new friend, and left for the night. 

“ This is a blessed relief, my dear,” said Helena. “ I have been 
dreading all day, that I should be brqught to bay at this time.” 

“ There are not many of us,” returned Rosa, “ and we are good- 
natured girls j at least the others are ; I can answer for them.” 

“ I can answer for you,” laughed Helena, searching the lovely ' 
little face with her dark fiery eyes, and tenderly caressing the small 
figure. “ You will be a friend to me, won’t you ? ” 

“ I hope so. But the idea of my being a friend to you seems » 
too absurd, though.” 

“Whyr’ 

“0, I am such a mite of a thing, and you are so womanly and ^ 
handsome. You seem to have resolution and power enough to 
crush me. I shrink into nothing by the side of your presence 
even.” . ^ ’ 

“I am a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all 
accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to 
learn, and deeply ashamed to own my ignorance.” 

“And yet you acknowledge everything to me ! ” said Rosa. ; 

“My pretty one, can I help it? There is a fascination in you.” • 

“0! is there though?” pouted Rosa, half in jest and half in 
earnest. “ What a pity Master Eddy doesn’t feel it more ! ” 

Of course her relations towards that young gentleman had been ‘ 
already imparted in Minor Canon Corner. 

“ Why, surely he must love you with all his heart ! ” cried Helena, 
with an earnestness that threatened to blaze into ferocity if he 
didn’t. 

“Eh? 0, well, I suppose he does,” said Rosa, pouting again; ' 
“ I am sure I have no right to say he doesn’t. Perhaps it’s my 
fault. Perhaps I am not as nice to him as I ought to be. I don’t 
think I am. But it is so ridiculous ! ” 

Helena’s eyes demanded what was. 

“ TTe are,” said Rosa, answering as if she had spoken. “We 
are such a ridiculous couple. And we are always quarrelling.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


391 


“Why?” 

“ Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear ! ” Rosa 
gave that answer as if it were the most conclusive answer in the 
world. 

Helena’s masterful look was intent upon her face for a few 
moments, and then she impulsively put out both her hands and 
said : 

“You will be my friend and help me?” 

“Indeed, my dear, I will,” replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate 
childishness that went straight and true to her heart ; “I will be 
as good a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble 
creature as you. And be a friend to me, please ; I don’t under- 
stand myself ; and I want a friend who can understand me, very 
much indeed.” 

Helena Landless kissed her, and retaining both her hands said : 

“ Who is Mr. Jasper ? ” 

Rosa turned aside her head in answering: “Eddy’s uncle, and 
my music-master.” 

“You do not love him?” 

“ Ugh ! ” She put her hands up to her face, and shook with 
fear or horror. 

“You know that he loves you?” 

“ 0, don’t, don’t, don’t ! ” cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, 
and clinging to her new resource. “ Don’t tell me of it ! He 
terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I 
feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in 
through the wall when he is spoken of.” She actually did look 
round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind 
her. 

“ Try to tell me more about it, darling.” 

“ Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold 
me the while, and stay with me afterwards.” 

“My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some 
dark way.” 

“ He has never spoken to me about — that. Never.” 

“ What has he done ? ” 

“ He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me 
to understand him, without his saying a word ; and he has forced 
me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, 
he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never 
moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a 
note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, 
whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me 
to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them 


392 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them 
(which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into 
a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me 
to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more 
terrible to me than ever.” 

“ What is this imagined threatening, pretty one ? What is 
threatened 1 ” 

“ I don’t know. I have never even dared to think or wonder 
what it is.” 

“ And was this all, to-night 1 ” 

“ This was all ; except that to-night when he watched my lips 
so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed 
and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t 
bear it, but cried out. You must never breathe this to any one. 
Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that you would not 
be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me — 
who am so much afraid of him — courage to tell only you. 
Hold me ! Stay with me ! I am too frightened to be left by 
myself.” 

The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, 
and the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish 
form. There was a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark 
eyes, though they were then softened with compassion and admira- 
tion. Let whomsoever it most concerned look well to it ! 


CHAPTER VIII. 

' DAGGEES DEAWN. 

The two young men, having seen the damsels, their charges, 
enter the courtyard of the Nuns’ House, and finding themselves 
coldly stared at by the brazen door-plate, as if the battered old 
beau with the glass in his eye were insolent, look at one another, 
look along the perspective of the moonlit street, and slowly walk 
away together. 

“Do you stay here long, Mr. Droodl” says Neville. 

“Not this time,” is the careless answer. “I leave for London 
again, to-morrow. But I shall be here, off and on, until next Mid- 
summer ; then I shall take my leave of Cloisterham, and England 
too j for many a long day, I expect.” 

“ Are you going abroad ? ” 

“ Going to wake up Egypt a little,” is the condescending answer. 

“ Are you reading ? ” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


393 


“Reading?” repeats Edwin Drood, with a touch of contempt. 
“No. Doing, working, engineering. My small patrimony was 
left a part of the capital of the Firm I am with, by my father, 
a former partner ; and I am a charge upon the Firm until I come 
of age ; and then I step into my modest share in the concern. 
Jack — you met him at dinner — is, until then, my guardian and 
trustee.” 

“ I heard from Mr. Crisparkle of your other good fortune.” 

“ What do you mean by my other good fortune ? ” 

Neville has made his remark in a watchfully advancing, and 
yet furtive and shy manner, very expressive of that peculiar air 
already noticed, of being at once hunter and hunted. Edwin has 
made his retort with an abruptness not at all polite. They stop 
and interchange a rather heated look. 

“I hope,” says Neville, “there is no offence, Mr. Drood, in my 
innocently referring to your betrothal ? ” 

“ By George ! ” cries Edwin, leading on again at a somewhat 
quicker pace ; “ everybody in this chattering old Cloisterham refers 
to it. I wonder no public-house has been set up, with my por- 
trait for the sign of The Betrothed’s Head. Or Pussy’s portrait. 
One or the other.” 

“I am not accountable for Mr. Crisparkle’s mentioning the 
matter to me, quite openly,” Neville begins. 

“ No ; that’s true ; you are not,” Edwin Drood assents. 

“ But,” resumes Neville, “ I am accountable for mentioning it 
to you. And I did so, on the supposition that you could not fail 
to be highly proud of it.” 

Now, there are these two curious touches of human nature 
working the secret springs of this dialogue. Neville 'Landless is 
already enough impressed by Little Rosebud, to feel indignant that 
Edwin Drood (far below her) should hold his prize so lightly. 
Edwin Drood is already enough impressed by Helena, to feel 
indignant that Helena’s brother (far below her) should dispose of 
him so coolly, and put him out of the way so entirely. 

However, the last remark had better be answered. So, says 
Edwin : 

“ I don’t know, Mr. Neville ” (adopting that mode of address 
from Mr. Crisparkle), “that what people are proudest of, they 
usually talk most about ; I don’t know either, that what they are 
proudest of, they most like other people to talk about. But I 
live a busy life, and I speak under correction by you readers, who 
ought to know everything, and I daresay do.” 

By this time they had both become savage ; Mr. Neville out in 
the open ; Edwin Drood under the transparent cover of a popular 


394 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


tune, and a stop now and then to pretend to admire picturesque 
effects in the moonlight before him. 

“ It does not seem to me very civil in you,” remarks Neville, at 
length, “to reflect upon a stranger who comes here, not having 
had your advantages, to try to make up for lost time. But, to be 
sure, I was not brought up in ‘busy life,’ and my ideas of civility 
were formed among Heathens.” 

“Perhaps, the best civility, whatever kind of people we are 
brought up among,” retorts Edwin Drood, “is to mind our own 
business. If you will set me that example, I promise to fol- 
low it.” 

“ Do you know that you take a great deal too much upon your- 
self? ” is the angry rejoinder, “and that in the part of the world I 
come from, you would be called to account for it ? ” 

“ By whom, for instance ? ” asks Edwin Drood, coming to a halt, 
and surveying the other with a look of disdain. 

But, here a startling right hand is laid on Edwin’s shoulder, 
and Jasper stands between them. For, it would seem that he, 
too, has strolled round by the Nuns’ House, and has come up 
behind them on the shadowy side of the road. 

“Ned, Ned, Ned !” he says ; “we must have no more of this. 
I don’t like this. I have overheard high words between you two. 
Remember, my dear boy, you are almost in the position of host 
to-night. You belong, as it were, to the place, and in a manner 
represent it towards a stranger. Mr. Neville is a stranger, and you 
should respect the obligations of hospitality. And, Mr. Neville,” 
laying his left hand on the inner shoulder of that young gentle- 
man, and thus walking on between them, hand to shoulder on 
either side : “you will pardon me ; but I appeal to you to govern 
your temper too. Now, what is amiss ? But why ask ! Let 
there be nothing amiss, and the question is superfluous. We are 
all three on a good understanding, are we not ? ” 

After a silent struggle between the two young men who shall 
speak last, Edwin Drood strikes in with ; “So far as I am con- 
cerned, Jack, there is no anger in me.” 

“Nor in me,” says Neville Landless, though not so freely ; or 
perhaps so carelessly. “But if Mr. Drood knew all that lies 
behind me, far away from here, he might know better how it is 
that sharp-edged words have sharp edges to wound me.” 

“ Perhaps,” says Jasper, in a smoothing manner, “ we had better 
not qualify our good understanding. We had better not say any- 
thing having the appearance of a remonstrance or condition ; it might 
not seem generous. Frankly and freely, you see there is no anger 
in Ned. Frankly and freely, there is no anger in you, Mr, Neville ? ” 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


395 


“ None at all, Mr. Jasper.” Still, not quite so frankly or so 
freely ; or, be it said once again, not quite so carelessly perhaps. 

“ All over, then ! Now, my bachelor gatehouse is a few yards 
from here, and the heater is on the fire, and the wine and glasses 
are on the table, and it is not a stone’s throw from Minor Canon 
Corner. Ned, you are up and away to-morrow. We will carry 
Mr. Neville in with us, to take a stirrup-cup.” 

“With all my heart. Jack.” 

“And with all mine, Mr. Jasper.” Neville feels it impossible 
to say less, but would rather not go. He has an impression upon 
him that he has lost hold of his temper ; feels that Edwin Drood’s 
coolness, so far from being infectious, makes him red-hot. 

Mr. J asper, still walking in the centre, hand to shoulder on either 
side, beautifully turns the Refrain of a drinking song, and they all 
go up to his rooms. There, the first object visible, when he adds 
the light of a lamp to that of the fire, is the portrait over the chim- 
ney piece. It is not an object calculated to improve the understand- 
ing between the two young men, as rather awkwardly reviving the 
subject of their difference. Accordingly, they both glance at it con- 
sciously, but say nothing. Jasper, however (who would appear 
from his conduct to have gained but an imperfect clue to the cause 
of their late high words), directly calls attention to it. 

“You recognise that picture, Mr, Neville ? ” shading the lamp 
to throw the light upon it. 

“ I recognise it, but it is far from flattering the original.” 

“ 0, you are hard upon it ! It was done by Ned, who made me 
a present of it.” 

“I am sorry for that, Mr. Drood.” Neville apologises, with a 
real intention to apologise ; “ if I had known I was in the artist’s 
presence — ” 

“ 0, a joke, sir, a mere joke,” Edwin cuts in, with a provoking 
yawn. “ A little humouring of Pussy’s points ! I’m going to paint 
her gravely, one of these days, if she’s good.” 

The air of leisurely patronage and indifference with which this is 
said, as the speaker throws himself back in a chair and clasps his 
hands at the back of his head, as a rest for it, is very exasperating 
to the excitable and excited Neville. Jasper looks observantly from 
the one to the other, slightly smiles, and turns his back to mix a jug 
of mulled wine at the fire. It seems to require much mixing and 
compounding. 

“I suppose, Mr. Neville,” says Edwin, quick to resent the indig- 
nant protest against himself in the face of young Landless, which is 
fully as visible as the portrait, or the fire, or the lamp : “ I suppose 
that if you painted the picture of your lady love — ” 


396 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“I can’t paint,” is the hasty interruption. 

“ That’s your misfortune, and not your fault. You would if you 
could. But if you could, I suppose you would make her (no mat- 
ter what she was in reality), Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, all 
in one. Eh ? ” 

“ I have no lady love, and I can’t say.” 

“If I were to try my hand,” says Edwin, with a boyish boast- 
fulness getting up in him, “on a portrait of Miss Landless — in 
earnest, mind you; in earnest — you should see what I could do ! ” 

“ My sister’s consent to sit for it being first got, I suppose ? As 
it never will be got, I am afraid I shall never see what you can do. 
I must bear the loss.” 

Jasper turns round from the fire, fills a large goblet glass for 
Neville, fills a large goblet glass for Edwin, and hands each his 
own ; then fills for himself, saying : 

“Come, Mr. Neville, we are to drink to my nephew, Ned. As 
it is his foot that is in the stirrup — metaphorically — our stirrup- 
cup is to be devoted to him. Ned, my dearest fellow, my love ! ” 

Jasper sets the example of nearly emptying his glass, and Neville 
follows it. Edwin Drood says, “Thank you both very much,” and 
follows the double example. 

“ Look at him,” cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly 
and tenderly, though rallyingly, too. “ See where he lounges so 
easily, Mr. Neville ! The world is all before him where to choose. 
A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, 
a life of domestic ease and love ! Look at him ! ” 

Edwin Drood’s face has become quickly and remarkably flushed 
with the wine ; so has the face of Neville Landless. Edwin still 
sits thrown back in his chair, making that rest of clasped hands for 
his head. 

“ See how little he heeds it all ! ” Jasper proceeds in a bantering 
vein. “ It is hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that 
hangs ripe on the tree for him. And yet consider the contrast, Mr. 
Neville. You and I have no prospect of stirring work and inter- 
est, or of change and excitement, or of domestic ease and love. 
You and I have no prospect (unless you are more fortunate than I 
am, which may easily be), but the tedious unchanging round of this 
dull place.” 

“Upon my soul. Jack,” says Edwin, complacently, “I feel quite 
apologetic for having my way smoothed as you describe. But you 
know what I know. Jack, and it may not be so very easy as it seems, 
after all. May it. Pussy 1 ” To the portrait, with a snap of his 
thumb and finger. “ We have got to hit it off yet ; haven’t we, 
Pussy? You know what I mean, Jack.” 




ON DANGEROUS GROUND 






398 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

His speech has become thick and indistinct. Jasper, quiet and 
self-possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or com- 
ment. When Neville speaks, hi^ speech is also thick and indis- 
tinct. 

“ It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some 
hardships,” he says, defiantly. • 

“ Pray,” retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, 
“ pray why might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known 
some hardships % ” 

“Ay,” Jasper assents, with an air of interest; “let us know 
why % ” 

“Because they might have made him more sensible,” says Neville, 
“ of good fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of 
his own merits.” 

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder. 

“ Have you known hardships, may I ask ? ” says Edwin Drood, 
sitting upright. 

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort. 

“ I have.” 

“ And what have they made you sensible of?” 

Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good through- 
out the dialogue, to the end. 

“ I have told you once before to-night.” 

“You have done nothing of the sort.” 

“ I tell you I have. That you take a great deal too much upon 
yourself.” 

“ You added something else to that, if I remember ? ” 

“Yes, I did say something else.” 

“ Say it again.” 

“ I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be 
called to account for it.” 

“ Only there ? ” cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh. 
“ A long way off, I believe ? Yes ; I see ! That part of the world 
is at a safe distance.” 

“ Say here, then,” rejoins the other, rising in a fury. “ Say any- 
where ! Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endur- 
ance ; you talk as if you were some rare and precious prize, instead 
of a common boaster. You are ^ common fellow, and a common 
boaster.” 

“ Pooh, pooh,” says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more col- 
lected ; “ how should you know ? You may know a black common 
fellow, or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt 
you have a large acquaintance that way) ; but you are no judge of 
white men.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


399 


This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to 
that violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin 
Drood, and is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his 
arm is caught in the nick of time by Jasper. 

“ Ned, my dear fellow ! ” he cries in a loud voice ; “ I entreat 
you, I command you, to be still ! ” There has been a rush of all the 
three, and a clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs. “ Mr. 
Neville, for shame ! Give this glass to me. Open your hand, sir. 
I WILL have it ! ” > 

But Neville throws him off*, and pauses for an instant, in a rag- 
ing passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand. Then, he 
dashes it down under the grate, with such force that the broken 
splinters fly out again in a shower ; and he leaves the house. 

When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is 
still or steady ; nothing around him shows like what it is ; he only 
knows that he stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood- 
red whirl, waiting to be struggled with, and to struggle to the 
death. 

But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him 
as if he were dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer 
beating head and heart, and staggers away. Then, he becomes 
half-conscious of having heard himself bolted and barred out, like 
a dangerous animal ; and thinks what shall he do ? 

Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the 
spell of the moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the 
remembrance of his sister, and the thought of what he owes to 
the good man who has but that very day won his confidence and 
given him his pledge. He repairs to Minor Canon Corner, and 
knocks softly at the door. 

It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early house- 
hold, very softly touching his piano and practising his favourite 
parts in concerted vocal music. The south wind that goes where 
it lists, by way of Minor Canon Corner on a still night, is not 
more subdued than Mr. Crisparkle at such times, regardful of the 
slumbers of the china shepherdess. 

His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself. 
When he opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, 
and disappointed amazement is in it. 

“ Mr.' Neville ! In this disorder ! Where have you been ? ” 

“ I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir. With his nephew.” 

“ Come in.” 

The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand 
(in a strictly scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), 
and turns him into his own little book-room, and shuts the door. 


400 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD 


“ I have begun ill, sir. I have begun dreadfully ill.” 

“ Too true. You are not sober, Mr. Neville.” 

“ I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another 
time that I have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it 
overcame me in the strangest and most sudden manner.” 

“ Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,” says the Minor Canon, shaking his 
head with a sorrowful smile ; “I have heard that said before.” 

“I think — my mind is much confused, but I think — it is 
equally true of Mr. Jasper’s nephew, sir.” 

“Very likely,” is the dry rejoinder. 

“We quarrelled, sir. He insulted me most grossly. He had 
heated that tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.” 

“ Mr. Neville,” rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly : 
“ I request you not to speak to me with that clenched right hand. 
Unclench it, if you please.” 

“ He goaded me, sir,” pursues the young man, instantly obey- 
ing, “ beyond my power of endurance. I cannot say whether or 
no he meant it at first, but he did it. He certainly meant it at 
last. In short, sir,” with an irrepressible outburst, “in the pas- 
sion into which he lashed me, I would have cut him down if I 
could, and I tried to do it.” 

“You have clenched that hand again,” is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet 
commentary. 

“ I beg your pardon, sir.” 

“You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner ; but 
I will accompany you to it once more. Your arm, if you please. 
Softly, for the house is all abed.” 

Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, 
and backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully 
as a Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattain- 
able by novices, Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant 
and orderly old room prepared for him. Arrived there, the young 
man throws himself into a chair, and, flinging his arms upon his 
reading-table, rests his head upon them with an air of wretched 
self-reproach. 

The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the 
room, without a word. But looking round at the door, and seeing 
this dejected figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild 
hand, and says “ Good night ! ” A sob is his only acknowledg- 
ment. He might have had many a worse ; perhaps, could have 
had few better. 

Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as 
he goes down-stairs. He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his 
hand the pupil’s hat. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 401 

“We have had an awful scene with him,” says Jasper, in a low 
voice. 

“ Has it been so bad as that ? ” 

“ Murderous ! ” 

Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: “No, no, no. Do not use such 
strong words.” 

“ He inight have laid my dear boy dead at my feet. It is no 
fault of his, that he did not. But that I was, through the mercy 
of God, swift and strong with him, he would have cut him down 
on my hearth.” 

The phrase smites home. “ Ah ! ” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “ his 
own words ! ” 

“ Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have 
heard,” adds Jasper, with great earnestness, “I shall never know 
peace of mind when there is danger of those two coming together, 
with no one else to interfere. It was horrible. There is some- 
thing of the tiger in his dark blood.” 

“ Ah ! ” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “so he said ! ” 

“You, my dear sir,” pursues Jasper, taking his hand, “even 
you, have accepted a dangerous charge.” 

“You need have no fear for me, Jasper,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, 
with a quiet smile. “ I have none for myself.” 

“I have none for myself,” returns Jasper, with an emphasis on 
the last pronoun, “because I am not, nor am I in the way of 
being, the object of his hostility. But you may be, and my dear 
boy has been. Good night ! ” 

Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so 
almost imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his 
hall : hangs it up ; and goes thoughtfully to bed. 


CHAPTER IX. 

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 

Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, 
from the seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ 
House, and no mother but Miss Twinkleton. Her remembrance 
of her own mother was of a pretty little creature like herself (not 
much older than herself it seemed to her), who had been brought 
home in her father’s arms, drowned. The fatal accident had 
happened at a party of pleasure. Every fold and colour in the 
pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered 
petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young 


402 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


figure, in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly 
in Rosa’s recollection. So were the wild despair and the subse- 
quent bowed-down grief of her poor young father, who died broken- 
hearted on the first anniversary of that hard day. 

The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of 
mental distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood : 
who likewise had been left a widower in his youth. But he, too, 
went the silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some 
sooner, and some later ; and thus the young couple had come to be 
as they were. 

The, atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when 
she first came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away. It had taken 
brighter hues as she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had 
been golden, now roseate, and now azure ; but it had always adorned 
her with some soft light of its own. The general desire to console 
and caress her, had caused her to be treated in the beginning as a 
child much younger than her years ; the same desire had caused 
her to be still petted when she was a child no longer. Who should 
be her favourite, who should anticipate this or that small present, 
or do her this or that small service ; who should take her home 
for the holidays ; who should write to her the oftenest when they 
were separated, and whom she would most rejoice to see again 
when they were, reunited ; even these gentle rivalries were not 
without their slight dashes of bitterness in the Nuns’ House. 
Well for the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder strife 
under their veils and rosaries ! 

Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning 
little creature ; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from 
all around her ; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference. 
Possessing an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its spar- 
kling waters had freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for 
years, and yet its depths had never yet been moved : what might 
betide when that came to pass ; what developing changes might 
fall upon the heedless head, and light heart, then ; remained to be 
seen. 

By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between 
the two young men overnight, involving even some kind of on- 
slaught by Mr. Neville upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twin- 
kleton’s establishment before breakfast, it is impossible to say. 
Whether it was brought in by the birds of the air, or came blow- 
ing in with the very air itself, when the casement windows were 
set open ; whether the baker brought it kneaded into the bread, or 
the milkman delivered it as part of the adulteration of his milk ; 
or the housemaids, beating the dust out of their mats against the 


THE MYSTERY OE EDWIN DROOD. 


403 


gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on the mats by the 
town atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated every 
gable of the old building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and 
that Miss Twinkleton herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while 
yet in the act of dressing ; or (as she might have expressed the 
phrase to a parent or guardian of a mythological turn) of sacrific- 
ing to the Graces. 

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood. 

^ Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood. 

A knife became suggestive of a fork ; and Miss Landless’s brother 
had thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood. 

As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have 
picked the peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable 
to have evidence of the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which 
Peter Piper was alleged to have picked ; so, in this case, it was held 
psychologically important to know why Miss Landless’s brother 
threw a bottle, knife, or fork — or bottle, knife, and fork — for 
the cook had been given to understand it was all three — at Mr. 
Edwin Drood 

Well, then. Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss 
Bud. Mr. Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that 
he had no business to admire Miss Bud. Miss Landless’s brother 
had then “ up’d ” (this was the cook’s exact information) with the 
bottle, knife, fork, and decanter (the decanter now coolly flying at 
everybody’s head, without the least introduction), and thrown them 
all at Mr. Edwin Drood. 

Poor little Rosa put a forefinger into each of her ears when these 
rumours began to circulate, and retired into a corner, beseeching 
not to be told any more ; but Miss Landless, begging permission 
of Miss Twinkleton to go and speak with her brother, and pretty 
plainly showing that she would take it if it were not given, struck 
out the more definite course of going to Mr. Crisparkle’s for accurate 
intelligence. 

When she came back (being first closeted with Miss Twinkleton, 
in order that anything objectionable in her tidings might be re- 
tained by that discreet filter), she imparted to Rosa only, what had 
taken place ; dwelling with a flushed cheek on the provocation her 
brother had received, but almost limiting it to that last gross 
affront as crowning “ some other words between them,” and, out 
of consideration for her new friend, passing lightly over the fact 
that the other words had originated in her lover’s taking things in 
general so very easily. To Rosa direct, she brought a petition 
from her brother that she would forgive him ; and, having delivered 
it with sisterly earnestness, made an end of the subject. 


404 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public 
mind of the Nuns’ House. That lady, therefore, entering in a 
stately manner what plebeians might have called the school- room, 
but what, in the patrician language of the head of the Nuns’ House, 
svas euphuistically, not to say round-aboutedly, denominated “ the 
apartment allotted to study,” and saying with a forensic air, 
“ Ladies ! ” all rose. Mrs. Tisher at the same time grouped her- 
self behind her chief, as representing Queen Elizabeth’s first histori- 
cal female friend at Tilbury Fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded 
to remark that Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by the bard 
of Avon — needless were it to mention the immortal Shakespeare, 
also called the Swan of his native river, not improbably with some 
reference to the ancient superstition that that bird of graceful 
plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand upright) sang sweetly on 
the approach of death, for which we have no ornithological author- 
ity, — Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by that bard — 
hem! — 

“ who drew 
The celebrated Jew,” 

as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdi- 
nand will honour me with her attention) was no exception to the 
great limner’s portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight Fracas 
between two young gentlemen occurring last night within a hun- 
dred miles of these peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being appar- 
ently incorrigible, will have the kindness to write out this evening, 
in the original language, the first four fables of our vivacious 
neighbour. Monsieur La Fontaine) had been very grossly exagger- 
ated by Rumour’s voice. In the first alarm and anxiety arising 
from our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly to be 
dissociated from one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in 
question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds’s appearing to stab 
herself in the band with a pin, is far too obvious, and too glaringly 
unlady-like, to be pointed out), we descended from our maiden 
elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme. Re- 
sponsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those 
“ airy nothings ” pointed at by the Poet (whose name and date of 
birth Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now 
discard the subject, and concentrate our minds upon the grateful 
labours of the day. 

But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdi- 
nand got into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper 
moustache at dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming 
a water-bottle at Miss Giggles, who drew a table-spoon in defence. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


405 


Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and 
thought of it with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved 
in it, as cause, or consequence, or what not, through being in a 
false position altogether as to her marriage engagement. Never 
free from such uneasiness when she was with her affianced husband, 
it was not likely that she would be free from it when they were 
apart. To-day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and deprived of 
the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the quarrel 
had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided 
the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself. At this criti- 
cal time, of all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having 
come to see her. 

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of 
incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality 
discernible on the surface. He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he 
had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground 
immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of 
hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur 
tippet ; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for 
the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such 
a head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut 
deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work ; and 
he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though 
Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, 
when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said : “I 
really cannot be worried to finish off this man ; let him go as he is.” 

With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much 
ankle-bone and heel at his lower ; with an awkward and hesitating 
manner ; with a shambling walk ; and with what is called a near 
sight — which perhaps prevented his observing how much white 
cotton stocking he displayed to the public eye, in contrast with 
his black suit — Mr. Grewgious still had some strange capacity in 
him of making on the whole an agreeable impression. 

Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by 
being in Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own 
sacred room. Dim forebodings of being examined in something, 
and not coming well out of it, seemed to oppress the poor gentle- 
man when found in these circumstances. 

“ My dear, how do you do ? I am glad to see you. My dear, 
how much improved you are. Permit me to hand you a chair, my 
dear.” 

Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with 
general sweetness, as to the polite Universe: “Will you permit 
me to retire 'i ” 


406 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ By no means, madam, on my account. I beg that you will 
not move.” 

“ I must entreat permission to returned Miss Twinkleton, 

repeating the word with a charming grace ; “ but I will not with- 
draw, since you are so obliging. If I wheel my desk to this 
corner window, shall I be in the way ? ” 

“ Madam ! In the way ! ” 

“You are very kind. — Rosa, my dear, you will be under no 
restraint, I am sure.” 

Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again : 
“ My dear, how do you do ? I am glad to see you, my dear.” 
And having waited for her to sit down, sat down himself. 

“My visits,” said Mr. Grewgious, “are, like those of the 
angels — not that I compare myself to an angel.” 

“No, sir,” said Rosa. 

“ Not by any means,” assented Mr. Grewgious. “ I merely refer 
to my visits, which are few and far between. The angels are, we 
know very well, up-stairs.” 

Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare. 

“I refer, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on 
Rosa’s, as the possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise 
seeming to take the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my 
dear ; “ I refer to the other young ladies.” 

Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing. 

Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening 
point quite as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head 
from back to front as if he had just dived, and were pressing the 
water out — this smoothing action, however superfluous, was habit- 
ual with him — and took a pocket-book from his coat-pocket, and 
a stump of black-lead pencil from his waistcoat-pocket. 

“I made,” he said, turning the leaves: “I made a guiding 
memorandum or so — as I usually do, for I have no conversational 
powers whatever — to which I will, with your permission, my 
dear, refer. ‘ Well and happy.’ Truly. You are well and happy, 
my dear? You look so.” 

“ Yes, indeed, sir,” answered Rosa. 

“For which,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head 
towards the corner window, “our warmest acknowledgments are 
due, and I am sure are rendered, to the maternal kindness and 
the constant care and consideration of the lady whom I have now 
the honour to see before me.” 

This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grew- 
gious, and never got to its destination ; for. Miss Twinkleton, feel- 
ing that the courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


407 


the conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, 
as waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celes- 
tial Nine who might have one to spare. 

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made 
another reference to his pocket-book ; lining out “ well and happy,” 
as disposed of. 

“ ‘ Pounds, shillings, and pence,’ is my next note. A dry subject 
for a young lady, but an important subject too. Life is pounds, 
shillings, and pence. Death is — ” A sudden recollection of the 
death of her two parents seemed to stop him, and he said in a 
softer tone, and evidently inserting the negative as an afterthought : 
“ Death is not pounds, shillings, and pence.” 

His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might 
have ground it straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff. And 
yet, through the very limited means of expression that he possessed, 
he seemed to express kindness. If Nature had but finished him 
off, kindness might have been recognisable in his face at this mo- 
ment. But if the notches in his forehead wouldn’t fuse together, 
and if his face would work and couldn’t play, what could he do, 
poor man ! 

“‘Pounds, shillings, and pence.’ You find your allowance 
always sufficient for your wants, my dear?” 

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample. 

“ And you are not in debt ? ” 

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt. It seemed, to her 
inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination. Mr. Grewgious 
stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the 
case. “Ah ! ” he said, as comment with a furtive glance towards 
Miss Twinkleton, and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence : “I 
spoke of having got among the angels ! So I did ! ” 

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and 
was blushing and folding a crease in her dress with one em- 
barrassed hand, long before he found it. 

“ ‘ Marriage.’ Hem ! ” Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing 
hand down over his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing 
his chair a little nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially : 
“ I now touch, my dear, upon the point that is the direct cause of 
my troubling you with the present visit. Otherwise, being a par- 
ticularly Angular man, I should not have intruded here. I am 
the last man to intrude into a sphere for which I am so entirely 
unfitted. I feel, on these premises, as if I was a bear — with the 
cramp — in a youthful Cotillon.” 

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set 
Rosa oft* laughing heartily. 


408 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“It strikes you in the same light,” said Mr. Grewgious, with 
perfect calmness. “Just so. To return to my memorandum. 
Mr. Edwin has been to and fro here, as was arranged. You have 
mentioned that, in your quarterly letters to me. And you like 
him, and he likes you.” 

“I like him very much, sir,” rejoined Rosa. 

“ So I said, my dear,” returned her guardian, for whose ear the 
timid emphasis was much too fine. “ Good. And you correspond.” 

“We write to one another,” said Rosa, pouting, as she recalled 
their epistolary differences. 

“ Such is the meaning that I attach to the word ‘ correspond ’ 
in this application, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ Good. All 
goes well, time works on, and at this next Christmas time it will 
become necessary, as a matter of form, to give the exemplary lady 
in the corner window, to whom we are so much indebted, business 
notice of your departure in the ensuing half-year. Your relations 
with her are far more than business relations, no doubt; but a 
residue of business remains in them, and business is business ever. 
I am a particularly Angular man,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, as if 
it suddenly occurred to him to mention it, “ and I am not used to 
give anything away. If, for these two reasons, some competent 
Proxy would give you away, I should take it very kindly.” 

Rosa intimated, with her eyes on the ground, that she thought 
a substitute might be found, if required. 

“ Surely, surely,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ For instance, the 
gentleman who teaches Dancing here — he would know how to do 
it with graceful propriety. He would advance and retire in a 
manner satisfactory to the feelings of the officiating clergyman, 
and of yourself, and the bridegroom, and all parties concerned. 
I am — I am a particularly Angular man,” said Mr. Grewgious, as 
if he had made up his mind to screw it out at last ; “ and should 
only blunder.” 

Rosa sat still and silent. Perhaps her mind had not got quite 
so far as the ceremony yet, but was lagging on the way there. 

“ Memorandum, ‘ Will.’ Now, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, 
referring to his notes, disposing of “Marriage” with his pencil, 
and taking a paper from his pocket; “although I have before 
possessed you with the contents of your father’s will, I think it 
right at this time to leave a certified copy of it in your hands. 
And although Mr. Edwin is also aware of its contents, I think it 
right at this time likewise to place a certified copy of it in Mr. 
Jasper’s hand — ” 

“Not in his own !” asked Rosa, looking up quickly. “Cannot 
the copy go to Eddy himself?” 


I 

I 


! 


i 

•I 

1 

I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


409 


“ Why, yes, my dear, if you particularly wish it ; hut I spoke 
of Mr. Jasper as being his trustee.” 

“I do particularly wish it, if you please,” said Rosa, hurriedly 
and earnestly ; “I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us, in 
any way.” 

“ It is natural, I suppose,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ that your 
young husband should be all in all. Yes. You observe that I 
say, I suppose. The fact is, I am a particularly Unnatural man, 
and I don’t know from my own knowledge.” 

Rosa looked at him with some wonder. 

“I mean,” he explained, “that young ways were never my 
ways. I was the only offspring of parents far advanced in life, 
and I half believe I was born advanced in life myself. No person- 
ality is intended towards the name you will so soon change, when 
I remark that while the general growth of people seem to have 
come into existence, buds, I seetn to have come into existence a 
chip. I was a chip — and a very dry one — when I first became 
aware of myself. Respecting the other certified copy, your wish 
shall be complied with. Respecting your inheritance, I think you 
know all. It is an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds. 
The savings upon that annuity, and some other items to your 
credit, all duly carried to account, with vouchers, will place you in 
possession of a lump-sum of money, rather exceeding Seventeen 
Hundred Pounds. I am empowered to advance the cost of your 
preparations for your marriage out of that fund. All is told.” 

“ Will you please tell me,” said Rosa, taking the paper with a 
prettily knitted brow, but not opening it ; “ whether I am right in 
what I am going to say ? I can understand what you tell me, so 
very much better than what I read in law-writings. My poor 
papa and Eddy’s father made their agreement together, as very 
dear and firm and fast friends, in order that we, too, might be 
very dear and firm and fast friends after them ? ” 

“Just so.” 

“ For the lasting good of both of us, and the lasting happiness 
of both of us ? ” 

“ Just so.” 

“ That we might be to one another even much more than they 
had been to one another ? ” 

“Just so.” 

“ It was not bound upon Eddy, and it was not bound upon me, 
by any forfeit, in case — ” 

“ Don’t be agitated, my dear. In the case that it brings tears 
into your affectionate eyes even to picture to yourself — in the case 
of your not marrying one another — no, no forfeiture on either 


410 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


side. You would then have been my ward until you were of age. 
No worse would have befallen you. Bad enough perhaps ! ” 

“And Eddy?” 

“He would have come into his partnership derived from his 
father, and into its arrears to his credit (if any), on attaining his 
majority, just as now.” 

Rosa, with her perplexed face and knitted brow, bit the corner 
of her attested copy, as she sat with her head on one side, looking 
abstractedly on the floor, and smoothing it with hef* foot. 

“ In short,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ this betrothal is a wish, a 
sentiment, a friendly project, tenderly expressed on both sides. 
That it was strongly felt, and that there was a lively hope that it 
would prosper, there can be no doubt. When you were both chil- 
dren, you began to be accustomed to it, and it has prospered. But 
circumstances alter cases ; and I made this visit to-day, partly, in- 
deed principally, to discharge myself of the duty of telling you, 
my dear, that two young people can only be betrothed in marriage 
(except as a matter of convenience, and therefore mockery and 
misery) of their own free will, their own attachment, and their 
own assurance (it may or it may not prove a mistaken one, but 
we must take our chance of that), that they are suited to each 
other, and will make each other happy. Is it to be supposed, for 
example, that if either of your fathers were living now, and had 
any mistrust on that subject, his mind would not be changed by 
the change of circumstances involved in the change of your years ? 
Untenable, unreasonable, inconclusive, and preposterous ! ” 

Mr. Grewgious said all this, as if he were reading it aloud ; or, 
still more, as if he were repeating a lesson. So expressionless of 
any approach to spontaneity were his face and manner. 

“I have now, my dear,” he added, blurring out “Will” with 
his pencil, “ discharged myself of what is doubtless a formal duty 
in this case, but still a duty in such a case. Memorandum, ‘Wishes : ’ 
My dear, is there any wish of yours that I can further ? ” 

Rosa shook her head, with an almost plaintive air of hesitation 
in want of help. 

“ Is there any instruction that I can take from you with refer- 
ence to your affairs ? ” 

“I — I should like to settle them with Eddy first, if you please,” 
said Rosa, plaiting the crease in her dress. 

“Surely, surely,” returned Mr. Grewgious. “You two should 
be of one mind in all things. Is the young gentleman expected 
shortly ? ” 

“He has gone away only this morning. He will be back at 
Christmas.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


411 


“Nothing could happen better. You will, on his return at 
Christmas, arrange all matters of detail with him ; you will then 
communicate with me ; and I will discharge myself (as a mere busi- 
ness acquittance) of my business responsibilities towards the accom- 
plished lady in the corner window. They will accrue at that season.” 
Blurring pencil once again. “ Memorandum, ‘ Leave.’ Yes. I 
will now, my dear, take my leave.” 

“ Could I,” said Rosa, rising, as he jerked out of his chair m his 
ungainly way : “ could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at 
Christmas, if I had anything particular to say to you ? ” 

“Why, certainly, certainly,” he rejoined ; apparently — if such a 
word can be used of one who had no apparent lights or shadows 
about him — complimented by the question. “ As a particularly 
Angular man, I do not fit smoothly into the social circle, and conse- 
quently I have no other engagement at Christmas^time than to par- 
take, on the twenty-fifth, of a boiled turkey and celery sauce with 
a — with a particularly Angular clerk I have the good fortune to 
possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer, sends him up (the 
turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood of Norwich. 
I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear. As 
a professional Receiver of rents, so very few people do wish to see 
me, that the novelty would be bracing.” 

For his ready acquiescence, the grateful Rosa put her hands 
upon his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and instantly kissed him. 

“ Lord bless me ! ” cried Mr. Grewgious. “ Thank you, my dear ! 
The honour is almost equal to the pleasure. Miss Twinkleton, 
madam, I have had a most satisfactory conversation with my ward, 
and I will now release you from the incumbrance of my presence.” 

“Nay, sir,” rejoined Miss Twinkleton, rising with a gracious 
condescension : “ say not incumbrance. Not so, by any means. 
I cannot permit you to say so.” 

“ Thank you, madam. I have read in the newspapers,” said Mr. 
Grewgious, stammering a little, “ that when a distinguished visitor 
(not that I am one : far from it) goes to a school (not that this is 
one : far from it), he asks for a holiday, or some sort of grace. It 
being now the afternoon in the — College — of which you are the 
eminent head, the young ladies might gain nothing, except in name, 
by having the rest of the day allowed them. But if there is any 
young lady at all under a cloud, might I solicit — ” 

“ Ah, Mr. Grewgious, Mr. Grewgious ! ” cried Miss Twinkleton, 
with a chastely-rallying forefinger. “ 0 you gentlemen, you gentle- 
men ! Fie for shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned 
disciplinarians of our sex, for your sakes ! But as Miss Ferdinand 
is at present weighed down by an incubus” — Miss Twinkleton 


412 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


might have said a pen-and-ink-uhus of writing out Monsieur La 
Fontaine — “go to her, Rosa my dear, and teU her the penalty is 
remitted, in deference to the intercession of your guardian, Mr. 
Grewgious.” 

Miss Twinkleton here achieved a curtsey, suggestive of marvels 
happening to her respected legs, and which she came out of nobly, 
three yards behind her starting-point. 

As he held it incumbent upon him to call on Mr. J asper before 
leaving Cloisterham, Mr. Grewgious went to the gatehouse, and 
climbed its postern-stair. But Mr. Jasper’s door being closed, and 
presenting on a slip of paper the word “ Cathedral,” the fact of its 
being service-time was borne into the mind of Mr. Grewgious. So 
he descended the stair again, and, crossing the Close, paused at 
the great western folding-door of the Cathedral, which stood open 
on the fine and bright, though short-lived, afternoon, for the airing 
of the place. 

“Dear me,” said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, “it’s like looking 
down the throat of Old Time.” 

Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault ; and 
gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners ;,and damps began to rise 
from green patches of stone ; and jewels, cast upon the pavement 
of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish. 
Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loom- 
ingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, 
and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked monotonous 
mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, 
the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teem- 
ing hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset : while the distant 
little windows in windmills and farm homesteads, shone, patches 
of bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became grey, murky, 
and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a 
dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth, and drowned 
it in a sea of music. Then, the sea fell, and the dying voice made 
another feeble effort, and then the sea rose high, and beat its life 
out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced 
the heights of the great tower ; and then the sea was dry, and all 
was still. 

Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, 
where he met the living waters coming out. 

“Nothing is the matter?” Thus Jasper accosted him, rather 
quickly. “You have not been sent for ? ” 

“Not at all, not at all. I came down of my own accord. I 
have been to my pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound 
again.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


413 


“You found her thriving?” 

“ Blooming indeed. Most blooming. I merely came to tell her, 
seriously, what a betrothal by deceased parents is.” 

“ And what is it — according to your judgment ? ” 

Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the 
question, and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral. 

“ I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered bind- 
ing, against any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, 
or want of disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either 
party.” 

“ May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that ? ” 

Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply : “ The especial reason 
of doing my duty, sir. Simply that.” Then he added ; “ Come, Mr. 
Jasper ; I know your affection for your nephew, and that you are 
quick to feel on his behalf. I assure you that this implies not the 
least doubt of, or disrespect ,to, your nephew.” 

“You could not,” returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of 
his arm, as they walked on side by side, “speak more handsomely.” 

Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, hav- 
ing smoothed it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again. 

“I will wager,” said Jasper, smiling — his lips were still so 
white that he was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them 
while speaking: “I will wager that she hinted no wish to be 
released from Ned.” 

“And you will win your wager, if you do,” retorted Mr. Grew- 
gious. “ We should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies 
in a young motherless creature, under such circumstances, I sup- 
pose ; it is not in my line ; what do you think ? ” 

“ There can be no doubt of it.” 

“ I am glad you say so. Because,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, 
who had all this time very knowingly felt his way round to action 
on his remembrance of what she had said of Jasper himself: “be- 
cause she seems to have some little delicate instinct that all prelimi- 
nary arrangements had best be made between Mr. Edwin Drood 
and herself, don’t you see ? She don’t want us, don’t you know ? ” 

Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indis- 
tinctly : “You mean me.” 

Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: “I 
mean us. Therefore, let them have their little discussions and 
councils together, when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at 
Christmas ; and then you and I will step in, and put the final 
touches to the business.” 

“ So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christ- 
mas?”’ observed Jasper. “I see! Mr. Grewgious, as you quite 


414 THE MYSTERY OE EUWIN DROOD. 

fairly said just now, there is such an exceptional attachment 
between my nephew and me, that I am more sensitive for the dear, 
fortunate, happy, happy fellow than for myself. But it is only 
right that the young lady should be considered, as you have pointed 
out, and that I should accept my cue from you. I accept it. I 
understand that at Christmas they will complete their preparations 
for May, and that their marriage will be put in final train by them- 
selves, and that nothing will remain for us but to put ourselves in 
train also, and have everything ready for our formal release from 
our trusts, on Edwin’s birthday. ” 

“ That is my understanding,” assented Mr. Grewgious, as they 
shook hands to part. “ God bless them both ! ” 

“ God save them both ! ” cried Jasper. 

“ I said, bless them,” remarked the former, looking back over 
his shoulder. 

“ I said, save them,” returned the latter. “ Is there any differ- 
ence r’ 


CHAPTER X. 

SMOOTHING THE WAY. 

It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious 
power of divining the characters of men, which would seem to be 
innate and instinctive ; seeing that it is arrived at through no pa- 
tient process of reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or suffi- 
cient account of itself, and that it pronounces in the most confident 
manner even against accumulated observation on the part of the 
other sex. But it has not been quite so often remarked that this 
power (fallible, like every other human attribute) is for the most 
part absolutely incapable of self-revision; and that when it has 
delivered an adverse opinion which by all human lights is subse- 
quently proved to have failed, it is undistinguishable from preju- 
dice, in respect of its determination not to be corrected. Nay, the 
very possibility of contradiction or disproof, however remote, com- 
municates to this feminine judgment from the first, in nine cases 
out of ten, the weakness attendant on the testimony of an inter- 
ested witness ; so personally and strongly does the fair diviner con- 
nect herself with her divination. 

“ Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,” said the Minor Canon to his 
mother one day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, 
“that you are rather hard on Mr. Neville?” 

“No, I do not, Sept,” returned the old lady. 

“ Let us discuss it, Ma.” 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 415 

“ I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trast, my dear, I 
am always open to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old 
lady’s cap, as though she internally added : “ and I should like 
to see the discussion that would change my mind ! ” 

“Very good, Ma,” said her conciliatory son. “ There is nothing 
like being open to discussion.” 

“I hope not, my dear,” returned the old lady, evidently shut to 
it. 

“ Well ! Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits him- 
self under provocation.” 

“ And under mulled wine,” added the old lady. 

“ I must admit the wine. Though I believe the two young men 
were much alike in that regard.” 

“ I don’t,” said the old lady. 

“ Why not, Ma ? ” 

“ Because I said the old lady. “ Still, I am quite open 

to discussion.” 

“ But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you 
take that line.” 

“ Blame Mr. Neville for it. Sept, and not me,” said the old lady, 
with stately severity. 

“ My dear Ma ! why Mr. Neville % ” 

“Because,” said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, “he 
came home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and 
showed great disrespect to this family.” 

“ That is not to be denied, Ma. He was then, and he is now, 
very sorry for it.” 

“ But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to 
me, next day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still 
on, and expressing his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed 
or had my rest violently broken, I believe I might never have 
heard of that disgraceful transaction,” said the old lady. 

“ To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if 
I could : though I had not decidedly made up my mind. I was 
following Jasper out, to confer with him on the subject, and to 
consider the expediency of his and my jointly hushing the thing up 
on all accounts, when I found him speaking to you. Then it was 
too late.” 

“ Too late, indeed. Sept. He was still as pale as gentlemanly 
ashes at what had taken place in his rooms overnight.” 

“ If I had kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have 
been for your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young 
men, and in my best discharge of my duty according to my 
lights.” 


416 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed 
him : saying, “ Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.” 

“ However, it became the town- talk,” said Mr. Crisparkle, rub- 
bing his ear, as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, 
“ and passed out of my power.” 

“And I said then. Sept,” returned the old lady,” that I thought 
ill of Mr. Neville. And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville. 
And I said then, and I say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come 
to good, but I don’t believe he will.” Here the cap vibrated again 
considerably. 

“ I am sorry to hear you say. so, Ma — ” 

“I am sorry to say so, my dear,” interposed the old lady, knit- 
ting on firmly, “ but I can’t help it.” 

“ — For,” pursued the Minor Canon, “it is undeniable that Mr. 
Neville is exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he im- 
proves apace, and that he has — I hope I may say — an attach- 
ment to me.” 

“There is no merit in the last article, my dear,” said the old 
lady, quickly ; “ and if he says there is, I think the worse of him 
for the boast.” 

“ But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.” 

“ Perhaps not,” returned the old lady; “still, I don’t see that it 
greatly signifies.” 

There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. 
Crisparkle contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted ; 
but there was, certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece 
of china to argue with very closely. 

“Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his 
sister. You know what an influence she has over him ; you know 
what a capacity she has ; you know that whatever he reads with 
you, he’ reads with her. Give her her fair share of your praise, and 
how much do you leave for him ? ” 

At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which 
he thought of several things. He thought of the times he had 
seen the brother and sister together in deep converse over one of 
his own old college books ; now, in the rimy mornings, when he 
made those sharpening pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, 
in the sombre evenings, when he faced the wind at sunset, having 
climbed his favourite outlook, a beetling fragment of monastery 
ruin ; and the two studious figures passed below him along the 
margin of the river, in which the town fires and lights already 
shone, making the landscape bleaker. He thought how the con- 
sciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was 
teaching two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his expla- 


I THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 417 

nations to both minds — that with which his own was daily in con- 
tact, and that which he only approached through it. He thought 
of the gossip that had reached him from the Nuns’ House, to the 
effect that Helena, whom he had mistrusted as so proud and fierce, 
submitted herself to the fairy-bride (as he called her), and learnt 
from her what she knew. He thought of the picturesque alliance 
between those two, externally so very different. He thought — 
perhaps most of all — could it be that these things were yet but 
so many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life ? 
j As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a musing, his good 
i mother took it to be an infallible sign that he “ wanted support,” 

I the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to 
j produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Oonstantia and 
; a home-made biscuit. It was a most wonderful closet, worthy of 
Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner. Above it, a portrait of 
Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator, with a 
knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a musical 
air of intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious 
fugue. No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable 
all at once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this 
rare closet had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides 
met ; the one falling down, and the other pushing up. The upper 
slide, on being pulled down (leaving the lower a double mystery), 
revealed deep shelves of pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice- 
' boxes, and agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the lus- 
cious lodgings of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent 
inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. 
The pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned 
coat, and yellow or sombre drab continuations, announced their 
portly forms, in printed capitals, as Walnut, G-herkin, Onion, Cab- 
bage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of that noble family. 
The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament, and as wear- 
i ,ing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine calligraphy, like 
I a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Dam- 
son, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and 
* the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a 
mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. 
Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accom- 
panied by a goodly fragment of plum-cake, and various slender 
ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed. Lowest 
of all, a compact leaden vault enshrined the sweet wine and a 
stock of cordials : whence issued whispers of Seville Orange, Lemon, 
Almond, and Caraway-seed. There was a crowning air upon this 
closet of closets, of having been for ages hummed through by the 

2 E 


418 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable bees had made 
sublimated honey of everything in store ; and it was always ob- 
served that every dipper among the shelves (deep, as has been 
noticed, and swallowing up head, shoulders, and elbows) came 
forth again mellow-faced, and seeming to have undergone a sac- 
charine transfiguration. 

The Reverend Septimus yielded himself up quite as willing a 
victim to a nauseous medicinal herb-closet, also presided over by 
the china shepherdess, as to this glorious cupboard. To what 
amazing infusions of gentian, peppermint, gilliflower, sage, parsley, 
thyme, rue, rosemary, and dandelion, did his courageous stomach 
submit itself! In what wonderful wrappers, enclosing layers of 
dried leaves, would he swathe his rosy and contented face, if his 
mother suspected him of a toothache ! What botanical blotches 
would he cheerfully stick upon his cheek, or forehead, if the dear 
old lady convicted him of an imperceptible pimple there ! Into 
this herbaceous penitentiary, situated on an upper staircase-land- 
ing : ' a low and narrow whitew^ashed cell, where bunches of dried 
leaves hung from rusty hooks in the ceiling, and were spread out 
upon shelves, in company with portentous bottles : would the Rev- 
erend Septimus submissively be led, like the highly popular lamb 
who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter, and 
there would he, unlike that lamb, bore nobody but himself. Not 
even doing that much, so that the old lady were busy and pleased, 
he would quietly swallow what was given him, merely taking a 
corrective dip of hands and face into the great bowl of dried rose- 
leaves, and into the other great bowl of dried lavender, and then 
would go out, as confident in the sweetening powers of Cloister- 
ham Weir and a wliolesome mind, as Lady Macbeth was hopeless 
of those of all the seas that roll. 

In the present instance the good Minor Canon took his glass 
of Constantia with an excellent grace, and, so supported to his 
mother’s satisfaction, applied himself to the remaining duties of the 
day. In their orderly and punctual progress they brought round 
Vesper Service and twilight. The Cathedral being very cold, he 
set off for a brisk trot after service ; the trot to end in a charge at 
his favourite fragment of ruin, which was to be carried by storm, 
without a pause for breath. 

He carried it in a masterly manner, and, not breathed even then, 
stood looking down upon the river. The river at Cloisterham is 
sufficiently near the sea to throw up oftentimes a quantity of sea- 
weed. An unusual quantity had come in with the last tide, and 
this, and the confusion of the water, and the restless dipping and 
flapping of the noisy gulls, and an angry light out seaward beyond 


THE MYSTERY OE EDWIN DROOD. 419 

I the brown- sailed barges that were turning black, foreshadowed a 
I stormy night. In his mind he was contrasting the wild and noisy 
i sea with the quiet harbour of Minor Canon Corner, when Helena 
and Neville Landless passed below him. He had had the two 
together in his thoughts all day, and at once climbed down to 
I speak to them together. The footing was rough in an uncertain 
light for any tread save that of a good climber ; but the Minor 
Canon was as good a climber as most men, and stood beside them 
before many good climbers would have been half-way down. 

“ A wild evening. Miss Landless ! Do you not find your usual 
walk with your brother too exposed and cold for the time of year ? 
Or at all events, when the sun is down, and the weather is driving 
in from the sea ? ” 

Helena thought not. It was their favourite walk. It was very 
retired. 

“ It is very retired,” assented Mr. Crisparkle, laying hold of his 
opportunity straightway, and walking on with them. “ It is a place 
of all others where one can speak without interruption, as I wish to 
do. Mr. Neville, I believe you tell your sister everything that passes 
between us ? ” 

' “Everything, sir.” 

; “ Consequently,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “your sister is aware that 

I I have repeatedly urged you to make some kind of apology for that 
i unfortunate occurrence which befell, on the night of your arrival 
I here.” 

j In saying it he looked to her, and not to him ; therefore it was 
I she, and not he, who replied : 

I “Yes.” 

“ I call it unfortunate. Miss Helena,” resumed Mr. Crisparkle, 
I “forasmuch as it certainly has engendered a prejudice against 
t Neville. There is a notion about, that he is a dangerously pas- 
l sionate fellow, of an uncontrollable and furious temper : he is really 
^ avoided as such.” 

I “ I have no doubt he is, poor fellow,” said Helena, with a look of 
; proud compassion at her brother, expressing a deep sense of his 
.being ungenerously treated. “I should be quite sure of it, from 
I * your saying so j but what you tell me is confirmed by suppressed 
hints and references that I meet with every day.” 

“ Now,” Mr. Crisparkle again resumed, in a tone of mild though 
firm persuasion, “ is not this to be regretted, and ought it not to 
be amended ? These are early days of Neville’s in Cloisterham, 
and I have no fear of his outliving such a prejudice, and proving 
himself to have been misunderstood. But how much wiser to take 
action at once, than to trust to uncertain time ! Besides, apart 


420 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


from its being politic, it is right. For there can be no question 
that Neville was wrong.” 

“ He was provoked,” Helena submitted. 

“ He was the assailant,” Mr. Crisparkle submitted. 

They walked on in silence, until Helena raised her eyes to the 
Minor Canon’s face, and said, almost reproachfully : “0 Mr. 
Crisparkle, would you have Neville throw himself at young Drood’s 
feet, or at Mr. Jasper’s, who maligns him every day? In your 
heart you cannot mean it. From your heart you could not do it, 
if his case were yours.” 

“I have represented to Mr. Crisparkle, Helena,” said Neville, 
with a glance of deference towards his tutor, “ that if I could do 
it from my heart, I would. But I cannot, and I revolt from the 
pretence. You forget, however, that to put the case to Mr. 
Crisparkle as his own, is to suppose Mr. Crisparkle to have done 
what I did.” 

“ I ask his pardon,” said Helena. 

“You see,” remarked Mr. Crisparkle, again laying hold of his 
opportunity, though with a moderate and delicate touch, “ you both 
instinctively acknowledge that Neville did wrong. Then why stop 
short, and not otherwise acknowledge it ? ” 

• “Is there no difference,” asked Helena, with a little faltering in 
her manner, “ between submission to a generous spirit, and submis 
sion to a base or trivial one ? ” 

Before the worthy Minor Canon was quite ready with his argu- 
ment in reference to this nice distinction, Neville struck in : 

“ Help me to clear myself with Mr. Crisparkle, Helena. Help 
me to convince him that I cannot be the first to make concessions 
without mockery and falsehood. My nature must be changed be- 
fore I can do so, and it is not changed. I am sensible of inex- 
pressible affront, and deliberate aggravation of inexpressible affront, 
and I am angry. The plain truth is, I am still as angry when I 
recall that night as I was that night.” 

“ Neville,” hinted the Minor Canon, with a steady countenance, 
“ you have repeated that former action of your hands, which I so 
much dislike.” 

“I am sorry for it, sir, but it was involuntary. I confessed 
that I was still as angry.” 

“And I confess,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that I hope for better 
things.” 

“lam sorry to disappoint you, sir, but it would be far worse to 
deceive you, and I should deceive you grossly if I pretended that 
you had softened me in this respect. The time may come when 
your powerful influence will do even that with the difficult pupil 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


421 


whose antecedents you know ; hut it has not come yet. Is this so, 
and in spite of my struggles against myself, Helena ? ” 

She, whose dark eyes were watching the effect of what he said 
on Mr. Crisparkle’s face, replied — to Mr. Crisparkle, not to him : 
“ It is so.” After a short pause, she answered the slightest look 
of inquiry conceivable, in her brother’s eyes, with as slight an 
affirmative bend of her own head ; and he went on : 

“ I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in 
full openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me 
on this subject. It is not easy to say, and I have been withheld 
by a fear of its seeming ridiculous, which is very strong upon me 
down to this last moment, and might, but for my sister, prevent 
my being quite open with you even now. — I admire Miss Bud, sir, 
so very much, that I cannot bear her being treated with conceit or 
indifference ; and even if I did not feel that I had an injury against 
young Drood on my own account, I should feel that I had an 
injury against him on hers.” 

Mr. Crisparkle, in utter amazement, looked at Helena for 
corroboration, and met in her expressive face full corroboration, 
and a plea for advice. 

“The young lady of whom you speak is, as you know, Mr. 
Neville, shortly to be married,” said Mr. Crisparkle, gravely ; 
“ therefore your admiration, if it be of that, special nature which 
you seem to indicate, is outrageously misplaced. Moreover, it is 
monstrous that you should take upon yourself to be the young 
lady’s champion against her chosen husband. Besides, you have 
seen them only once. The young lady has become your sister’s 
friend ; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has not 
checked you in this irrational and culpable fancy.” 

“ She has tried, sir, but uselessly. Husband or no husband, that 
fellow is incapable of the feeling with which I am inspired towards 
the beautiful young creature whom he treats like a doll. I say he 
is as incapable of it, as he is unworthy of her. I say she is sacri- 
ficed in being bestowed upon him. I say that I love her, and de- 
spise and hate him ! ” This with a face so flushed, and a gesture 
so violent, that his sister crossed to his side, and caught his arm, 
remonstrating, “ Neville, Neville ! ” 

Thus recalled to himself, he quickly became sensible of having 
lost the guard he had set upon his passionate tendency, and cov- 
ered his face with his hand, as one repentant and wretched. 

Mr. Crisparkle, watching him attentively, and at the same time 
meditating how to proceed, walked on for some paces in silence. 
Then he spoke : 

“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville, I am sorely grieved to see in you 


422 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


more traces of a character as sullen, angry, and wild, as the night 
now closing in. They are of too serious an aspect to leave me the 
resource of treating the infatuation you have disclosed, as undeserv- 
ing serious consideration. I give it very serious consideration, and 
I speak to you accordingly. This feud between you and young 
Drood must not go on. I cannot permit it to go on any longer, 
knowing what I now know from you, and you living under my 
roof. Whatever prejudiced and unauthorised constructions your 
blind and envious wrath may put upon his character, it is a frank, 
good-natured character. I know I can trust to it for that. Now, 
pray observe what I am about to say. On reflection, and on your 
sister’s representation, I am willing to admit that, in making peace 
with young Drood, you have a right to be met half way. I will 
engage that you shall be, and even that young Drood shall make 
the first advance. This condition fulfilled, you will pledge me the 
honour of a Christian gentleman that the quarrel is for ever at an 
end on your side. What may be in your heart when you give him 
your hand, can only be known to the Searcher of all hearts ; but it 
will never go well with you, if there be any treachery there. So 
far, as to that ; next as to what I must again speak of as your in- 
fatuation. I understand it to have been confided to me, and to be 
known to no other person save your sister and yourself. Do I 
understand aright ? ” . 

Helena answered in a low voice ; “It is only known to us three 
who are here together.” 

“ It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend ? ” 

“ On my soul, no ! ” 

“ I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, 
Mr. Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will 
take no other action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and 
that most earnestly) to erase it from your mind. I will not tell 
you that it will soon pass ; I will not tell you that it is the fancy 
of the moment ; I will not tell you that such caprices have their 
rise and fall among the young and ardent every hour ; I will leave 
you undisturbed in the belief that it has few parallels or none, that 
it will abide with you a long time, and that it will be very difficult 
to conquer. So much the more weight shall I attach to the pledge 
I require from you, when it is unreservedly given.” 

The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed. 

“ Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took 
home,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “ You will find me alone in my room 
by-and-bye.’’ 

“Pray do not leave us yet,” Helena implored him. “Another 
minute.” 



% 


MR. CRI8PARKLE IS OVERPAID 






424 


THE MYSTERY OE EDWIN DROOD. 


“ I should not,” said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, 
‘•'have needed so much as another minute, if you had been less 
patient with me, Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less 
unpretendingly good and true. 0, if in my childhood I had known 
such a guide ! ” 

“Follow your guide now, Neville,” murmured Helena, “and 
follow him to Heaven ! ” 

There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s 
voice, or it would have repudiated her exaltation of him. As it 
was, he laid a finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother. 

“To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my 
innermost heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to 
say nothing ! ” Thus Neville, greatly moved. “ I beg your for- 
giveness for my miserable lapse into a burst of passion.” 

“Not mine, Neville, not mine. You know with whom forgive- 
ness lies, as the highest attribute conceivable. Miss Helena, you 
and your brother are twin children. You came into this world with 
the same dispositions, and you passed your younger days together 
surrounded by the same adverse circumstances. What you have 
overcome in yourself, can you not overcome in him ? You see the 
rock that lies in his course. Who but you can keep him clear of 
it?” 

“ Who but you, sir ? ” replied Helena. “ What is my influence, 
or my weak wisdom, compared with yours ! ” 

“You have the wisdom of Love,” returned the Minor Canon, 
“and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, 
remember. As to mine — but the less said of that commonplace 
commodity the better. Good night ! ” 

She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost rev- 
erently raised it to her lips. 

“ Tut ! ” said the Minor Canon softly, “ I am much overpaid ! ” 
and turned away. 

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he 
went along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to 
pass what he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be 
done. “ I shall probably be asked to marry them,” he reflected, 
“ and I would they were married and gone ! But this presses 
first.” He debated principally whether he should write to young 
Drood, or whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness 
of being popular with the whole Cathedral establishment inclined 
him to the latter course, and the well-timed sight of the lighted 
gatehouse decided him to take it. “ I will strike while the iron is 
hot,” he said, “and see him now.” 

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


425 


ascended the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at 
the door, Mr. Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in. 
Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from 
the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and 
crying out : “ What is the matter ? Who did it ? ” 

“ It is only I, Jasper. ^ I am sorry to have disturbed you.” 

The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and 
he moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside. 

“I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed 
from an indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention that you 
are always welcome.” 

“ Thank you. I am not confident,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, as 
he sat himself down in the easy chair placed for him, “ that my 
subject will at first sight be quite as welcome as myself ; but I am 
a minister of peace, and I pursue my subject in the interests of 
peace. In a word, Jasper, I want to establish peace between these 
two young fellows.” 

A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face ; a 
very perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make 
nothing of it. 

“ How ? ” was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a 
silence. 

“ For the ‘How ’ I come to you. I want to ask you to do me 
the great favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I 
have already interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write 
you a short note, in his lively way, saying that he is willing to 
shake hands. I know what a good-natured fellow he is, and what 
influence you have with him. And without in the least defending 
Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly stung.” 

Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire. Mr. 
Crisparkle continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing 
than before, inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly 
be) some close internal calculation. 

“ I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,” 
the Minor Canon was going on, when J asper stopped him : 

“You have cause to say so. I am not, indeed.” 

“ Undoubtedly ; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, 
though I hope he and I will get the better of it between us. But 
I have exacted a very solemn promise from him as to his future 
demeanour towards your nephew, if you do kindly interpose ; and 
I am sure he will keep it.” 

“You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. 
Do you really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently ? ” 

“Ido.” 


426 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


The perplexed and perplexing look vanished. 

“Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy 
weight,” said Jasper; “I will do it.” 

Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of 
his success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms. 

“I will do it,” repeated Jasper, “for the comfort of having your 
guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears. You will laugh 
— but do you keep a Diary ? ” 

“ A line for a day ; not more.” 

“ A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life 
would need, Heaven knows,” said Jasper, taking a book from a 
desk ; “but that my Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too. 
You will laugh at this entry ; you will guess when it was made ; 

“ ‘Past midnight. — After what I have just now seen, I have a 
morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to 
my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend 
against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this 
Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for 
the destruction of its object, appal me. So profound is the impres- 
sion, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to as- 
sure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.’ 

“ Here is another entry next morning : 

“ ‘Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever. 
He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man 
as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he 
was not as bad a man. He continued to make light of it, but I 
travelled with him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly. 
I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of 
evil — if feelings founded upon staring facts are to be so called.’ 

“ Again and again,” said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves 
of the book before putting it by, “I have relapsed into these moods, 
as other entries show. But I have now your assurance at my 
back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my 
black humours.” 

“Such an antidote, I hope,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, “as will 
induce you before long to consign the black humours to the flames. 

I ought to be the last to And any fault with you this evening, when 
you have met my wishes so freely ; but I must say, Jasper, that 
your devotion to your nephew has made you exaggerative here.” 

“You are my witness,” said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, 

“ what my state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


427 


down to write, and in what words I expressed it. You remember 
objecting to a word I used, as being too strong ? It was a stronger 
word than any in my Diary.” 

“ Well, well. Try the antidote,” rejoined Mr. Crisparkle ; “ and 
may it give you a brighter and better view of the case ! We will 
discuss it no more now. I have to thank you for myself, and I 
thank you sincerely.” 

“You shall find,” said Jasper, as they shook hands, “that I will 
not do the thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will take care 
that Ned, giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.” 

On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. 
Crisparkle with the following letter : 

“My dear Jack, 

“I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. 
Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I openly 
say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. 
Landless did, and that I wish that bygone to be a bygone, and 
all to be right again. 

“Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on 
Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let 
there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there and 
then, and say no more about it. 

“My dear Jack, 

“Ever your most affectionate, 

“Edwin Drood. 

“ P.S. Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.” 

“You expect Mr. Neville, then?” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ I count upon his coming,” said Mr. Jasper. 


CHAPTER XI. 

A PICTURE AND A RING. 

Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain 
gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public 
way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long 
run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, 
called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which 
out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the 
sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his 
boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter 


428 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, “ Let us play 
at country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards 
of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny 
understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal 
nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its 
roof : to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, 
this history knoweth not. 

In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a 
railroad afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the prop- 
erty of us Britons : the odd fortune of which sacred institution it 
is to be in exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for, and 
boasted of, whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world : 
in those days no neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had 
arisen to overshadow Staple Inn. The westering sun bestowed 
bright glances on it, and the southwest wind blew into it unimpeded. 

Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one Decem- 
ber afternoon towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and 
candles shed murky and blurred rays through the windows of all 
its then-occupied sets of chambers ; notably from a set of cham- 
bers in a corner house in the little inner quadrangle, presenting in 
black and white over its ugly portal the mysterious inscription : 

P 

J T 

1747. 

In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about 
the inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing 
up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Per- 
haps Joe Tyler, sat Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire. 

Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he 
had ever known ambition or disappointment ? He had been bred 
to the Bar, and had laid himself out for chamber practice; to 
draw deeds ; “convey the wise it call,” as Pistol says. But Con- 
veyancing and he had made such a very indifferent marriage of it 
that they had separated by consent — if there can be said to be 
separation where there has never been coming together. 

No. Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious. 
She was wooed, not won, and they went their several ways. But 
an Arbitration being blown towards him by some unaccountable 
wind, and he gaining great credit in it as one indefatigable in seek- 
ing out right and doing right, a pretty fat Receivership was next 
blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable to its source. So, 
by chance, he bad found his niche. Receiver and Agent now, to 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


429 


two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount 
worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had 
snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), 
and had settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life 
: under the dry vine and ffg-tree of P. J. T., who planted in seven- 
teen-forty-seven. 

Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, 
and several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room. They 
can scarcely be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious 
and precise was their orderly arrangement. The apprehension of 
dying suddenly, and leaving one fact or one figure with any incom- 
pleteness or obscurity attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. 
Grewgious stone-dead any day. The largest fidelity to a trust was 
the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of life-blood that course 
more quickly, more gaily, more attractively ; but there is no better 
sort in circulation. 

There was no luxury in his room. Even its comforts were lim- 
ited to its being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded 
fireside. What may be called its private life was confined to the 
hearth, and an easy chair, and an old-fashioned occasional round 
table that was brought out upon the rug after business hours, from 
a corner where it elsewise remained turned up like a shining 
mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing thus on the defen- 
sive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink. 
An outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping- 
room was across the common stair ; and he held some not empty 
cellarage at the bottom of the common stair. Three ’hundred days 
in the year, at least, he crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn 
for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to make the 
most of these simplicities until it should become broad business 
day once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-seven. 

As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so 
did the clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by his fire. A pale, 
puffy-faced, dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that 
wholly wanted lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that 
seemed to ask to be sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mys- 
terious being, possessed of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious. 
As though he had been called into existence, like a fabulous Famil- 
iar, by a magic spell w^hich had failed when required to dismiss him, 
he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool, although Mr. Grewgious’s 
comfort and convenience would manifestly have been advanced by 
dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a 
general air of having been reared under the shadow of that bale- 
ful tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the 


430 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

whole botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated 
him with unaccountable consideration. 

“Now, Bazzard,” said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his 
clerk ; looking up from his papers as he arranged them for the 
night : “ what is in the wind besides fog ? ” 

“ Mr. Drood,” said Bazzard. 

“What of him?” 

“ Has called,” said Bazzard. 

“You might have shown him in.” 

“ I am doing it,” said Bazzard. 

The visitor came in accordingly. 

“ Dear me ! ” said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of 
office candles. “ I thought you had called and merely left your 
name and gone. How do you do, Mr. Edwin ? Dear me, you’re 
choking ! ” 

“ It’s this fog,” returned Edwin ; “and it makes my eyes smart, 
like Cayenne pepper.” 

“ Is it really so bad as that ? Pray undo your wrappers. It’s 
fortunate I have so good a fire ; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care 
of me.” 

“No I haven’t,” said Mr. Bazzard at the door. 

“Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself 
without observing it,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ Pray be seated in 
my chair. No. I beg I Coming out of such an atmosphere, in 
my chair.” 

Edwin took the easy chair in the corner ; and the fog he had 
brought in with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat 
and neck-shawl, was speedily licked up by the eager fire. 

“I look,” said Edwin, smiling, “as if I had come to stop.” 

“ — By-the-bye,” cried Mr. Grewgious; “excuse my interrupt- 
ing you ; do stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can 
have dinner in from just across Holborn. You had better take 
your Cayenne pepper here than outside ; pray stop and dine.” 

“You are very kind,” said Edwin, glancing about him as though 
attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party. 

“ Not at all,” said Mr. Grewgious “ you are very kind to join 
issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I’ll 
ask,” said Mr. Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with 
a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a bright thought : “ I’ll ask 
Bazzard. He mightn’t like it else. — Bazzard ! ” 

Bazzard reappeared. 

“ Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.” 

“ If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,” was the gloomy 
answer. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


431 


“ Save the man ! ” cried Mr. Grewgious. “ You’re not ordered ; 
you’re invited.” 

“Thank you, sir,” said Bazzard; “in that case I don’t care if 
I do.” 

“That’s arranged. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. 
Grewgious, “ stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking 
them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll 
have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll 
have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we’ll have 
a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a 
turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to 
be in the bill of fare — in short, we’ll have whatever there is on 
hand.” 

• These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air 
of reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything 
else by rote. Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, with- 
drew to execute them. . 

“ I was a little delicate, you see,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower 
tone, after his clerk’s departure, “ about employing him in the for- 
aging or commissariat department. Because he mightn’t like it.” 

“ He seems to have his own way, sir,” remarked Edwin. 

“ His own way ? ” returned Mr. Grewgious. “ 0 dear no ! Poor 
fellow, you quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn’t 
be here.” 

“ I wonder where he would be ! ” Edwin thought. But he only 
thought it, because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with 
his back to the other corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades 
against the chimneypiece, and collected his skirts for easy conver- 
sation. 

“ I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have 
done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going 
down yonder — where I can tell you, you are expected — and to 
offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming 
ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in any proceedings? 
Eh, Mr. Edwin?” 

“ I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.” 

“ Of attention ! ” said Mr. Grewgious. “ Ah ! of course, not of 
impatience ? ” 

“Impatience, sir?” 

Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch — not that he in the remot- 
est degree expressed that meaning — and had brought himself into 
scarcely supportable proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest 
effect of his archness into himself, as other subtle impressions are 
burnt into hard metals. But his archness suddenly flying before 


432 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


the composed face and manner of his visitor, and only the fire 
remaining, he started and rubbed himself. 

“I have lately been down yonder,” said Mr. Grewgious, re- 
arranging his skirts ; “ and that was what I referred to, when I 
said I could tell you you are expected.” 

“ Indeed, sir ! Yes ; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.” 

“Do you keep a cat dowm there T’ asked Mr. Grewgious. 

Edwin coloured a little as he explained : “ I call Rosa Pussy.” 

“0, really,” said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; 
“that’s very affable.” 

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously 
objected to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced 
at the face of a clock. 

“A pet name, sir,” he explained again. 

“Umps,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an 
extraordinary compromise between an unqualified assent and a 
qualified dissent, that his visitor was much disconcerted. 

“ Did PRosa — ” Edwin began by way of recovering himself. 

“PRosa?” repeated Mr. Grewgious. 

“I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind; — did she 
tell you anything about the Landlesses ? ” 

“No,” said Mr. Grewgious. “What is the Landlesses? An 
estate ? A villa ? A farm ? ” 

“ A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and 
has become a great friend of P — ” 

“PRosa’s,” Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face. 

“ She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might 
have been described to you, or presented to you perhaps ? ” 

“ Neither,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ But here is Bazzard.” 

Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters — an immovable 
waiter, and a flying waiter ; and the three brought in with them 
as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, 
who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with 
amazing rapidity and dexterity ; while the immovable waiter, who 
had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then 
highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable 
waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across 
Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another 
flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another 
flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between 
whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as 
it w^as discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had 
forgotten them all. But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he 
might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable 


433 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

waiter for bringing fog with him, and being out of breath. At the 
conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely 
blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under his 
arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not to say with indigna- 
tion) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the clean glasses 
round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, con- 
veying : “ Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward 
is mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,” and pushed the 
flying waiter before him out of the room. 

It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My 
Lords of the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief 
of any sort. Government. It was quite an edifying little picture 
to be hung on the line in the National Gallery. 

As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous re- 
past, so the fog served for its general sauce. To hear the out-door 
clerks sneezing, wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was 
a zest far surpassing Doctor Kitchener’s. To bid, with a shiver, 
the unfortunate flying waiter shut the door before he had opened 
it, was a condiment of a profounder flavour than Harvey. And here 
let it be noticed, parenthetically, that the leg of this young man, 
in its application to the door, evinced the finest sense of touch : 
always preceding himself and tray (with something of an angling 
air about it), by some seconds : and always lingering after he and 
the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying 
him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan. 

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bot- 
tles of ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened 
long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering 
in the shade. Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they 
pushed at their corks to help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping 
rioters to force their gates), and danced out gaily. If P. J. T. in 
seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his period, drank such 
wines — then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too. 

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed 
by these glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they 
might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and 
run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over 
his face. Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden 
way, he had observant eyes for Edwin ; and when at the end of 
dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own easy chair in the fire- 
side corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it after very brief re- 
monstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round towards 
the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been seen 
looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers. 

2 F 


434 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Bazzard ! ” said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him. 

“I follow you, sir,” returned Bazzard ; who had done his work 
of consuming meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though 
mostly in speechlessness. 

“I drink to you, Bazzard ; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard ! ” 

“ Success to Mr. Bazzard ! ” echoed Edwin, with a totally un- 
founded appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addi- 
tion : “ What in, I wonder ! ” 

“And May!” pursued Mr. Grewgious — “I am not at liberty 
to be definite — May I — my conversational powers are so very 
limited that I know I shall not come well out of this — May 1 — 
it ought to be put imaginatively, but I have no imagination — 
May 1 — the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark as I am likely 
to get — May it come out at last ! ” 

Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into 
his tangled locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there ; then into 
his waistcoat, as if it were there ; then into his pockets, as if it 
were there. In all these movements he was closely followed by 
the eyes of Edwin, as if that young gentleman expected to see the 
thorn in action. It was not produced, however, and Mr. Bazzard 
merely said : “I follow you, sir, and I thank you.” 

“I am going,” said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the 
table with one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, 
to whisper to Edwin, “ to drink to my ward. But I put Bazzard 
first. He mightn’t like it else.” 

This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have 
been a wink if, in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick 
enough. So Edwin winked responsively, without the least idea 
what he meant by doing so. 

“And now,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I devote a bumper to the 
fair and fascinating Miss Rosa. Bazzard, the fair and fascinating 
Miss Rosa I ” 

“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I pledge you ! ” 

“And so do I! ” said Edwin. 

“ Lord bless me,” cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence 
which of course ensued : though why these pauses should come upon 
us when we have performed any small social rite, not directly in- 
ducive of self-examination or mental despondency, who can telH 
“ I am a particularly Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use 
the word, not having a morsel of fancy), that I could draw a pict- 
ure of a true lover’s state of mind, to-night.” 

“Let us follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and have the picture.” 

“Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,” resumed Mr. 
Grewgious, “and will throw in a few touches from the life. I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


435 


dare say it is wrong in many particulars, and wants many touches 
from the life, for I w^as born a Chip, and have neither soft sympa- 
thies nor soft experiences. Well ! I hazard the guess that the 
true lover’s mind is completely permeated by the beloved object of 
his affections. I hazard the guess that her dear name is precious 
to him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and is pre- 
served sacred. If he has any distinguishing appellation of fond- 
ness for her, it is reserved for her, and is not for common ears. A 
name that it would be a privilege to call her by, being alone with 
her own bright self, it would be a liberty, a coldness, an insensi- 
bility, almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt elsewhere.” 

It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with 
his hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out 
of himself : much as a charity boy with a very good memory might 
get his catechism said : and evincing no correspondent emotion 
whatever, unless in a certain occasional little tingling perceptible 
at the end of his nose. 

“ My picture,” Mr. Grewgious proceeded, “goes on to represent 
(under correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever 
impatient to be in the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of 
his affections ; as caring very little for his ease in any other society ; 
and as constantly seeking that. If I was to say seeking that, as 
a bird seeks its nest, I should make an ass of myself, because that 
would trench upon what I understand to be poetry ; and I am so 
far from trenching upon poetry at any time, that I never, to my 
knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of it. And I am besides 
totally unacquainted with the habits of birds, except the birds of 
Staple Inn, who seek their nests on ledges, and in gutter-pipes and 
chimneypots, not constructed for them by the beneficent hand of 
Nature. I beg, therefore, to be understood as foregoing the bird’s- 
nest. But my picture does represent the true lover as having no 
existence separable from that of the beloved object of his affections, 
and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life. And if I do 
not clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the reason 
that having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I 
mean, or that having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to 
express. Which, to the best of my belief, is not the case.” 

Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of 
this picture came into the light. He now sat looking at the fire, 
and bit his lip. 

“ The speculations of an Angular man,” resuined Mr. Grewgious, 
still sitting and speaking exactly as before, “are probably erro- 
neous on so globular a topic. But I figure to myself (subject, as 
before, to Mr. Edwin’s correction), that there can be no coolness, 


436 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


no lassitude, no doubt, no indifference, no half fire and half smoke 
state of mind, in a real lover. Pray am I at all near the mark in 
my picture ? ” 

As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, 
he jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have 
supposed him in the middle of his oration. 

“I should say, sir,” stammered Edwin, “as you refer the 
question to me — ” 

“Yes,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I refer it to you, as an authority.” 

“ I should say, then, sir,” Edwin went on, embarrassed, “ that 
the picture you have drawn is generally correct ; but I submit that 
perhaps you may be rather hard upon the unlucky lover.” 

“Likely so,” assented Mr. Grewgious, “likely so. I am a hard 
man in the grain.” 

“ He may not show,” said Edwdn, “ all he feels ; or he may not — ” 

There he stopped so long, to find the rest of his sentence, that 
Mr. Grewgious rendered his difficulty a thousand times the greater 
by unexpectedly striking in with : 

“ No to be sure ; he may not ! ” 

After that, they all sat silent ; the silence of Mr. Bazzard being 
occasioned by slumber. 

“His responsibility is very great, though,” said Mr. Grewgious 
at length, with his eyes on the fire. 

Edwin nodded assent, with eyes on the fire. 

“And let him be sure that he trifles with no one,” said Mr. 
Grewgious ; “ neither with himself, nor with any other.” 

Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire. 

“He must not make a plaything of a treasure. Woe betide 
him if he does ! Let him take that well to heart,” said Mr. 
Grewgious. 

Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the sup- 
posititious charity boy just now referred to might have repeated a 
verse or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something 
dreamy (for so literal a man) in the way in which he now shook 
his right forefinger at the live coals in the grate, and again fell 
silent. 

But not for long. As he sat upright and stiff in his chair, he 
suddenly rapped his knees, like the carved image of some queer 
Joss or other coming out of its reverie, and said : “We must finish 
this bottle, Mr. Edwin. Let me help you. I’ll help Bazzard too, 
though he asleep. He mightn’t like it else.” 

He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, 
and stood it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just 
caught a bluebottle in it. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


437 


“ And now, Mr. Edwin,” he proceeded, wiping his mouth and 
hands upon his handkerchief : “to a little piece of business. You 
received from me, the other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s 
father’s will. You knew its contents before, but you received it 
from me as a matter of business. I should have sent it to Mr. 
Jasper, but for Miss Rosa’s wishing it to come straight to you, in 
preference. You received it? ” 

“ Quite safely, sir.” 

“You should have acknowledged its receipt,” said Mr. Grew- 
gious ; “ business being business all the world over. However, 
you did not.” 

“ I meant to have acknowledged it when I first came in this 
evening, sir.” 

“Not a business-like acknowledgment,” returned Mr. Grewgious ; 
“ however, let that pass. Now, in that document you have observed 
a few words of kindly allusion to its being left to me to discharge 
a little trust, confided to me in conversation, at such time as I in 
my discretion may think best.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“ Mr. Edwin, it came into my mind just now, when I was look- 
ing at the fire, that I could, in my discretion, acquit myself of that 
trust at no better time than the present. Favour me with your 
attention, half a minute.” 

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the 
candle-light the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his 
hand, went to a bureau or escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring 
of a little secret drawer, and took from it an ordinary ring-case made 
i for a single ring. With this in his hand, he returned to his chair. 

' As he held it up for the young man to see, his hand trembled. 

“ Mr. Edwin, this rose of diamonds and rubies delicately set in 
I gold, was a ring belonging to Miss Rosa’s mother. It was removed 
I from her dead hand, in my presence, with such distracted grief as 
I hope it may never be my lot to contemplate again. Hard man 
as I am, I am not hard enough for that. See how bright these 
stones shine ! ” opening the case. “And yet the eyes that were so 
much brighter, and that so often looked upon them with a light 
and a proud heart, have been ashes among ashes, and dust among 
dust, some years ! If I had any imagination (which it is needless 
to say I have not), I might imagine that the lasting beauty of these 
stones was almost cruel.” 

He closed the case again as he spoke. 

“ This ring was given to the young lady who was drowned so 
early in her beautiful and happy career, by her husband, when they 
first plighted their faith to one another. It was he who removed 


438 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


it from her unconscious hand, and it was he who, when his death 
drew very near, placed it in mine. The trust in which I received 
it, was, that, you and Miss Rosa growing to manhood and woman- 
hood, and your betrothal prospering and coming to maturity, I should 
give it to you to place upon her finger. Failing those desired results, 
it was to remain in my possession.” 

Some trouble was in the young man’s face, and some indecision 
was in the action of his hand, as Mr. Grewgious, looking steadfastly 
at him, gave him the ring. 

“Your placing it on her finger,” said Mr. Grewgious, “will be 
the solemn seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead. ^ 
You are going to her, to make the last irrevocable preparations for , 
your marriage. Take it with you.” t 

The young man took the little case, and placed it in his breast. 

“If anything should be amiss, if anything should be even slightly ; 
wrong, between you ; if you should have any secret consciousness ’ 
that you are committing yourself to this step for no higher reason 
than because you have long been accustomed to look forward to it ; 
then,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ I charge you once more, by the living 
and by the dead, to bring that ring back to me ! ” 

Here Bazzard awoke himself by his own snoring ; and, as is . 
usual in such cases, sat apoplectically staring at vacancy, as defy- 
ing vacancy to accuse him of having been asleep. 

“ Bazzard ! ” said Mr. Grewgious, harder than ever. 

“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I have been following, 
you.” 

“In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a 
ring of diamonds and rubies. You see 'i ” 

Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it ; and Bazzard 
looked into it. 

“ I follow you both, sir,” returned Bazzard, “and I witness the 
transaction.” 

Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now 
resumed his outer clothing, muttering something about time and 
appointments. The fog was reported no clearer (by the flying 
waiter, who alighted from a speculative flight in the coffee interest), 
but he went out into it ; and Bazzard, after his manner, “ followed ” 
him. 

Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, 
for an hour and more. He was restless to-night, and seemed 
dispirited. 

“I hope I have done right,” he said. “The appeal to him 
seemed necessary. It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it musti 
have gone from me very soon.” ■ 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


439 


He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and 
locked the escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside. 

“ Her ring,” he went on. “ Will it come back to me ? My mind 
hangs about her ring very uneasily to-night. But that is explain- 
able. I have had it so long, and I have prized it so much ! I 
wonder — ” 

He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless ; for, though 
he checked himself at that point, and' took another walk, he 
resumed his wondering when he sat down again. 

“ I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, 
for what can it signify now !) whether he confided the charge of 
their orphan child to me, because he knew — Good God, how like 
her mother she has become ! 

“ I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one 
doted on her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in 
and won her. I wonder whether it ever crept into his mind who 
that unfortunate some one was ! 

“I wonder whether I shall sleep to-night! At all events, I 
will shut out the world with the bedclothes, and try.” 

Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bed- 
room, and was soon ready for bed. Dimly catching sight of his 
face in the misty looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a mo- 
ment. 

“ A likely some one, you^ to come into anybody’s thoughts in 
such an aspect ! ” he exclaimed. “ There ! there ! there I Get to 
bed, poor man, and cease to jabber ! ” 

With that, he extinguished his light, pulled up the bedclothes 
around him, and with another sigh shut out the world. And yet 
there are such unexplored romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men, 
that even old tinderous and touch-woody P. J. T. Possibly Jabbered 
Thus, at some odd times, in or about seventeen-forty-seven. 


CHAPTER XII. 

A NIGHT WITH HURDLES. 

When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, 
and finds the contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little 
monotonous in spite of the vastness of the’ subject, he often takes 
an airing in the Cathedral Close and thereabout. He likes to pass 
the churchyard with a swelling air of proprietorship, and to encour- 
age in his breast a sort of benignant-landlord feeling, in that he has 
been bountiful towards that meritorious tenant, Mrs. Sapsea, and 


440 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


has publicly given her a prize. He likes to see a stray face or two 
looking in through the railings, and perhaps reading his inscription. 
Should he meet a stranger coming from the churchyard with a quick 
step, he is morally convinced that the stranger is “ with a blush 
retiring,” as monumentally directed. 

Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has 
become Mayor of Cloisterham. Without mayors, and many of 
them, it cannot be disputed that the whole framework of society 
— Mr. Sapsea is confident that he invented that forcible figure — 
would fall to pieces. Mayors have been knighted for “ going up ” 
with addresses : explosive machines intrepidly discharging shot and 
shell into the English Grammar. Mr. Sapsea may “go up ” with 
an address. Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea ! Of such is the salt of the 
earth. 

Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since 
their first meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, 
beef, and salad. Mr. Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse 
with kindred hospitality ; and on that occasion Mr. Jasper seated 
himself at the piano, and sang to him, tickling his ears — figura- 
tively — long enough to present a considerable area for tickling. 
What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man is, that he is always 
ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and that he is sound, 
sir, at the core. In proof of which, he sang to Mr. Sapsea that 
evening, no kickshaw ditties, favourites with national enemies, but 
gave him the genuine George the Third home-brewed ; exhorting 
him (as “my brave boys”) to reduce to a smashed condition 
all other islands but this island, and all continents, peninsulas, 
isthmuses, promontories, and other geographical forms of land so- 
ever, besides sweeping the seas in all directions. In short, he ren- 
dered it pretty clear that Providence made a distinct mistake in 
originating so small a nation of hearts of oak, and so many other 
verminous peoples. 

Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the church- 
yard with his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and 
retiring stranger, turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly 
presence of the Dean, conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper. 
Mr. Sapsea makes his obeisance, and is instantly stricken far more 
ecclesiastical than any Archbishop of York or Canterbury. 

“You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,” 
quoth the Dean ; “ to write a book about us. Well ! We are very 
ancient, and we ought to make a good book. We are not so richly 
endowed in possessions as in age ; but perhaps you will put that in 
your book, among other things, and call attention to our wrongs.” 

Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


441 


“I really have no intention at all, sir,” replies Jasper, “of turn- 
ing author or archaeologist. It is but a whim of mine. And even 
for my whim, Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.” 

“ How so, Mr. Mayor ? ” says the Dean, with a nod of good- 
natured recognition of his Fetch. “ How is that, Mr. Mayor ? ” 

“ I am not aware,” Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for 
information, “to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the 
honour of referring.” And then falls to studying his original in 
minute points of detail. 

“ Durdles,” Mr. Tope hints. 

“ Ay ! ” the Dean echoes ; “ Durdles, Durdles ! ” 

“The truth is, sir,” explains Jasper, “that my curiosity in the 
man was first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea. Mr. Sapsea’s knowl- 
edge of mankind and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or 
odd around him, first led to my bestowing a second thought upon 
the man ; though of course I had met him constantly about. You 
would not be surprised by this, Mr. Dean, if you had seen Mr. Sapsea 
deal with him in his own parlour, as I did.” 

“ 0 ! ” cries Sapsea, picking up the ba# thrown to him with in- 
effable complacency and pomposity; “yes, yes. The Very Rever- 
end the Dean refers to that ? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles 
and Mr. Jasper together. I regard Durdles as a Character.” 

“ A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you 
turn inside out,” says Jasper. 

“Nay, not quite that,” returns the lumbering auctioneer. “ I 
may have a little influence over him, perhaps ; and a little insight 
into, his character, perhaps. The Very Reverend the Dean will 
please to bear in mind that I have seen the world.” Here Mr. 
Sapsea gets a little behind the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons. 

“ Well ! ” says the Dean, looking about him to see what has 
become of his copyist : “I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your 
study and knowledge of Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting 
him not to break our worthy and respected Choir-Master’s neck ; 
we cannot afibrd it ; his head and voice are much too valuable to 
us.” 

Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into re- 
spectful convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential mur- 
mur, importing that surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure 
and an honour to have his neck broken, in return for such a com- 
pliment from such a source. 

“ I will take it upon myself, sir,” observes Sapsea loftily, “ to 
answer for Mr. Jasper’s neck. I will tell Durdles to be careful of 
it. He will mind what I say. How is it at present endangered ? ” 
he inquires, looking about him with magnificent patronage. 


442 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among 
the tombs, vaults, towers, and ruins,” returns Jasper. “You re- 
member suggesting, when you brought us together, that, as a lover 
of the picturesque, it might be worth my while ? ” 

“/ remember!” replies the auctioneer. And the solemn idiot 
really believes that he does remember. 

“Profiting by your hint,” pursues Jasper, “I have had some 
day-rambles with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make 
a moonlight hole-and-corner exploration to-night.” 

“ And here he is,” says the Dean, 

Durdles, with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld 
slouching towards them. Slouching nearer, and perceiving the 
Dean, he pulls off his hat, and is slouching away with it under his 
arm, when Mr. Sapsea stops him. 

“Mind you take care of my friend,” is the injunction Mr. Sapsea 
lays upon him. 

“What friend o’ yourn is dead?” asks Durdles. “No orders 
has come in for any friend o’ yourn.” 

“I mean my live friend there.” 

“ 0 I him ? ” says Durdles. “ He can take care of himself, can 
Mister Jarsper.” 

“ But do you take care of him too,” says Sapsea. 

Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone), surlily sur- 
veys from head to foot. 

“ With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind 
what concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns 
him.” 

“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the com- 
pany to observe how smoothly he will manage him. “ My friend 
concerns me, and Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my 
friend.” 

“ Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, 
with a grave cautionary nod. “ It’ll grow upon you.” 

“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but 
again winking to the company. 

“ I own to it,” returns Durdles ; “ I don’t like liberties.” 

Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should 
say: “I think you will agree with me that I have settled his 
business ; ” and stalks out of the controversy. 

Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he 
puts his hat on, “ You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as 
agreed, when you want me ; I’m a going home to clean myself,” 
soon slouches out of sight. This going home to clean himself is 
one of the man’s incomprehensible compromises with inexorable 




DUIIDLES CAUTIONS MR. SAPSEA AGAINST BOASTING. 




444 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


facts ; he, and his hat, and his boots, and his clothes, never show- 
ing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly in one condition of 
dust and grit. 

The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of 
light, and running at a great rate up and down his little ladder 
with that object — his little ladder under the sacred shadow of 
whose inconvenience generations had grown up, and which all 
Cloisterham would have stood aghast at the idea of abolishing — 
the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr. Tope to his tea, and Mr. 
Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but that of the fire, he 
sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful voice, for two or 
three hours ; in short, until it has been for some time dark, and 
the moon is about to rise. 

Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a 
pea-jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket, 
and putting on a low-crowned fiap-brimmed hat, goes softly out. 
Why does he move so softly to-night ? No outward reason is 
apparent for it. Can there be any sympathetic reason crouching 
darkly within him ? 

Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, 
and seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the 
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already 
touched here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon. The two 
journeymen have left their two great saws sticking in their blocks 
of stone ; and two skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death 
might be grinning in the shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes, 
about to slash away at cutting out the gravestones of the next 
two people destined to die in Cloisterham. Likely enough, the 
two think little of that now, being alive, and perhaps merry. 
Curious, to make a guess at the two ; — or say one of the two ! 

“ Ho ! Durdles ! ” 

The light moves, and he appears with it at the door. He would 
seem to have been “cleaning himself” with the aid of a bottle, 
jug, and tumbler ; for no other cleansing instruments are visible in 
the bare brick room with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, 
into which he shows his visitor. 

“ Are you ready ? ” 

“I am ready, Mister Jarsper. Let the old uns come out if 
they dare, when we go among their tombs. My spirit is ready for 
’em.” 

“ Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent ? ” 

“ The one’s the t’other,” answers Durdles, “ and I mean ’em 
both.” 

He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


445 


pocket wherewith to light it, should there be need ; and they go 
out together, dinner-bundle and all. 

Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition ! That Durdles him- 
self, who is always prowling among old gi-aves, and ruins, like a 
Ghoule — that he should be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and 
'wander without an object, is nothing extraordinary; but that the 
Choir-Master or any one else should hold it worth his while to be 
with him, and to study moonlight effects in such company is another 
affair. Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition, therefore ! 

“ ’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mi'ster Jarsper.” 

“I see it. AVhat is it ” 

“Lime.” 

Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags 
behind. “ What you call quick-lime ? ” 

“ Ay ! ” says Durdles ; “ quick enough to eat your boots. With 
a little handy stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.” 

They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travel- 
lers’ Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the 
Monks’ Vineyard. This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner : 
of which the greater part lies in shadow until the moon shall rise 
higher in the sky. 

The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two 
men come out. These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville. Jasper, 
with a strange and sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of 
his hand upon the breast of Durdles, stopping him where he 
stands. 

At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the 
existing state of the light : at that end, too, there is a piece of 
old dwarf wall, breast high, the only remaining boundary of what 
was once a garden, but is now the thoroughfare. J asper and Durdles 
would have turned this wall in another instant ; but, stopping so 
short, stand behind it. 

“ Those two are only sauntering,” Jasper whispers ; “ they will 
go out into the moonlight soon. Let us keep quiet here, or they 
will detain us, or want to join us, or what not.” 

Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from 
his bundle. Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, 
with his chin resting on them, watches. He takes no note what- 
ever of the Minor Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye 
were at the trigger of a loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and 
were going to fire. A sense of destructive power is so expressed 
in his face, that even Durdles pauses in his munching, and looks 
at him, with an unmunched something in his cheek. 

Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly 


446 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


talking together. What they say, cannot he heard consecutively ; 
but Mr. Jasper has already distinguished his own name more than 
once. 

“This is the first day of the week,” Mr. Crisparkle can be dis- 
tinctly heard to observe, as they turn back ; “ and the last day of 
the week is Christmas Eve.” 

“ You may be certain of me, sir.” 

The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two 
approach, the sound of their talking becomes confused again. The 
word “confidence,” shattered by the echoes, but still capable of 
being pieced together, is uttered by Mr. Crisparkle. As they draw 
still nearer, this fragment of a reply is heard : “Not deserved yet, 
but shall be, sir.” As they turn away again, Jasper again hears 
his own name, in connection with the words from Mr. Crisparkle ; 
“ Remember that I said I answered for you confidently.” Then 
the sound of their talk becomes confused again ; they halting for a 
little while, and some earnest action on the part of Neville succeed- 
ing. When they move once more, Mr. Crisparkle is seen to look up 
at the sky, and to point before him. They then slowly disappear ; 
passing out into the moonlight at the opposite end of the Corner. 

It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves. But then 
he turns to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter. Durdles, 
who still has that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees 
nothing to laugh at, stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face 
down on his arms to have his laugh out. Then Durdles bolts the 
something, as if desperately resigning himself to indigestion. 

Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement 
after dark. There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but 
there is next to none at night. Besides that the cheerfully fre- 
quented High Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathe- 
dral rising between the two), and is the natural channel in which 
the Cloisterham traffic fiows, a certain awful hush pervades the an- 
cient pile, the cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not 
many people care to encounter. Ask the first hundred citizens of 
Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed 
in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at 
night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, 
and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round 
and the more frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found 
in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts — albeit a 
mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from 
her neck, ^has been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as 
intangible* as herself — but it is to be sought in the innate shrink- 
ing of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


447 


breath of life has passed ; also, in the widely diffused, and almost 
as widely unacknowledged, reflection : “If the dead do, under any 
circumstances, become visible to the living, these are such likely 
surroundings for the purpose that I, the living, will get out of them 
as soon as I can.” 

Hence, when Mr. Jasper and Durdles pause to glance around 
them, before descending into the crypt by a small side door, of 
which the latter has a key, the whole expanse of moonlight in their 
view is utterly deserted. One might fancy that the tide of life was 
stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own gatehouse. The murmur of the tide 
is heard beyond ; but no wave passes the archway, over which 
his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were 
a Lighthouse. 

They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and 
are down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moon- 
light strikes in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken 
frames for which cast patterns on the ground. The heavy pillars 
which support the roof engender masses of black shade, but be- 
tween them there are lanes of light. Up and down these lanes 
they walk, Durdles discoursing of the “ old uns ” he yet counts on 
disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which he considers “ a whole 
family on ’em ” to be stoned and earthed up, just as if he were a 
familiar friend of the family. The taciturnity of Durdles is for 
the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s wicker bottle, which circulates 
freely ; — in the sense, that is to say, that its contents enter freely 
into Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only rinses his 
mouth once, and casts forth the rinsing. . 

They are to ascend the great Tower. On the steps by which 
they rise to the Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath. 
The steps are very dark, but out of the darkness they can see the 
lanes of light they have traversed. Durdles seats himself upon a 
step. Mr. Jasper seats himself upon another. The odour from 
the wicker bottle (which has somehow passed into Durdles’s keep- 
ing) soon intimates that the cork has been taken out ; but this is 
not ascertainable through the sense of sight, since neither can de- 
scry the other. And yet, in talking, they turn to one another, as 
though their faces could commune together. 

“ This is good stuff. Mister Jarsper ! ” 

“It is very good stuff, I hope. I bought it on purpose.” 

“ They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t. Mister Jarsper ! ” 

“ It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.” 

“ Well, it would lead towards a mixing of things,” Durdles ac- 
quiesces : pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not 
previously presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light. 


448 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

domestically or chronologically. “ But do you think there may be 
Ghosts of other things, though' not of men and women ? ” 

“ What things ? Flower-beds and watering-pots ? horses and 
harness ? ” 

“No. Sounds.” 

“ What sounds ? ” \ 

“ Cries.” 

“ What cries do you mean ? Chairs to mend ? ” 

“No. I mean screeches. Now I’ll tell you, Mister Jarsper. Wait 
a bit till I put the bottle right.” Here the cork is evidently taken 
out again, and replaced again. “ There ! Now it’s right ! This 
time last year, only a few days later, I happened to have been 
doing what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it the 
welcome it had a right to expect, when them townboys set on me 
at their worst. At length I gave ’em the slip, and turned in here. 
And here I fell asleep. And what woke me ? The ghost of a cry. 
The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the 
ghost of the howl of a dog : a long dismal woeful howl, such as a 
dog gives when a person’s dead. That was my last Christmas 
Eve.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” is the very abrupt, and, one might say, 
fierce retort. 

“ I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no 
living ears but mine heard either that cry or that ho vl. So I say 
they was both ghosts ; though why they came to me, I’ve never 
made out.” 

“ I thought you were another kind of man,” says Jasper, scorn- 
fully. 

“So I thought myself,” answers Durdles with his usual com- 
posure ; “ and yet I was picked out for it.” 

Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, 
and he now says, “ Come ; we shall freeze here ; lead the way.” 

Durdles complies, not oversteadily ; opens the door at the top of 
the steps with the key he has already used ; and so emerges on the 
Cathedral level, in a passage at the side of the chancel. Here, 
the moonlight is so very bright again that the colours of the near- 
est stained-glass window are thrown upon their faces. The appear- 
ance of the unconscious Durdles, holding the door open for his 
companion to follow, as if from the grave, is ghastly enough, with a 
purple band across his face, and a yellow splash upon his brow ; 
but he bears the close scrutiny of his companion in an insensible 
way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles among his 
pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate, so 
to enable them to pass to the staircase of the great tower. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


449 


“ That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,” he says, giv- 
ing it to Durdles ; “ hand your bundle to me ; I am younger and 
longer-winded than you.” Durdles hesitates for a moment between 
bundle and bottle ; but gives the preference to the bottle as being 
by far the better company, and consigns the dry weight to his 
fellow-explorer. 

Then they go up the winding staircase of the great tower, toil- 
somely, turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the 
stairs above, or the rough stone pivot around which they twist. 
Durdles has lighted his lantern, by drawing from the cold hard wall 
a spark of that mysterious fire which lurks in everything, and, 
guided by this speck, they clamber up among the cobwebs and the 
dust. Their way lies through strange places. Twice or thrice 
they emerge into level low-arched galleries, whence they can look 
down into the moonlit nave ; and where Durdles, waving his lan- 
tern, waves the dim angels’ heads upon the corbels of the roof, 
seeming to watch their progress. Anon they turn into narrower 
and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to blow upon them, 
and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes 
the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating 
down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving their 
light behind a stair — for it blows fresh up here — they look down 
on Cloisterham, fair to see in the moonlight : its ruined habitations 
and sanctuaries of the dead, at the Tower’s base : its moss-softened 
red-tiled roofs and red-brick houses of the living, clustered beyond : 
its river winding down from the mist on the horizon, as though that 
were its source, and already heaving with a restless knowledge of 
its approach towards the sea. 

Once again, an unaccountable expedition this ! Jasper (always 
moving softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and 
especially that stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows. 
But he contemplates Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by 
times conscious of his watchful eyes. 

Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy. As aero- 
nauts lighten the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly 
Durdles has lightened the wicker bottle in coming up. Snatches 
of sleep surprise him on his legs, and stop him in his talk. A mild 
fit of calenture seizes him, in which he deems that the ground so 
far below, is on a level with the Tower, and would as lief walk off 
the Tower into the air as not. Such is his state when they begin to 
come down. And as aeronauts make themselves heavier when they 
wish to descend, similarly Durdles charges himself with more liquid 
from the wicker bottle, that he may come down the better. 

The iron gate attained and locked — but not before Durdles has 

2 a 


450 


THE MYSTERY OE EDWIN DROOD. 


tumbled twice, and cut an eyebrow open once — they descend into 
the Crypt again, with the intent of issuing forth as they entered. 
But, while returning among those lanes of light, Durdles becomes 
so very uncertain, both of foot and speech, that he half drops, half 
throws himself down, by one of the heavy pillars, scarcely less 
heavy than itself, and indistinctly appeals to his companion for 
forty winks of a second each. 

“ If you will have it so, or must have it so,” replies Jasper, “ I’ll 
not leave you here. Take them, while I walk to and fro.” 

Durdles is asleep at once ; and in his sleep he dreams a dream. 

It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the 
domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions ; it is only 
remarkable for being unusually restless and unusually real. He 
dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion’s 
footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps 
die away into distance of time and of space, and that something 
touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then some- 
thing clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so 
long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon 
advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes 
into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold ; and painfully awakes 
to a perception of the lanes of light — really changed, much as he 
had dreamed — and Jasper walking among them, beating his 
hands and feet. 

“Holloa !” Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed. 

“Awake at last?” says Jasper, coming up to him. “Do you 
know that your forties have stretched into thousands ? ” 

“No.” 

“ They have though.” 

“ What’s the time ? ” 

“ Hark ! The bells are going in the Tower ! ” 

They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes. 

“ Two ! ” cries Durdles, scrambling up ; “ why didn’t you try to 
wake me. Mister Jarsper ? ” 

“I did. I might as well have tried to wake the dead — your 
own family of dead, up in the corner there.” 

“ Did you touch me ? ” 

“ Touch you ! Yes. Shook you.” 

As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he 
looks down on the pavement, and sees the key of the Crypt door 
lying close to where he himself lay. 

“ I dropped you, did I ? ” he says, picking it up, and recalling 
that part of his dream. As he gathers himself up again into 
an upright position, or into a position as nearly upright as he 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


451 


ever maintains, he is again conscious of being watched by his 
companion. 

“Well?” says Jasper, smiling, “are you quite ready? Pray 
don’t hurry.” 

“ Let me get my bundle right. Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.” 

As he ties it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very 
narrowly observed. 

“ What do you suspect me of. Mister Jarsper ? ” he asks, with 
drunken displeasure. “ Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles 
name ’em.” 

“ I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles ; but I have 
suspicions that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than 
either of us supposed. And I also have suspicions,” Jasper adds, 
taking it from the pavement and turning it bottom upwards, “that 
it’s empty.” 

Durdles condescends to laugh at this. Continuing to chuckle 
when his laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his 
drinking powers, he rolls to the door and unlocks it. They both 
pass out, and Durdles relocks it, and pockets his key. 

“A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,” says 
Jasper, giving him his hand; “you can make your own way 
home ? ” 

“ I should think so ! ” answers Durdles. “ If you was to offer 
Durdles the affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go 
home. 

Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning ; 

And then Durdles wouldn’t go home, 

Durdles wouldn’t.” This with the utmost defiance. 

“ Good night, then.” 

“ Good night. Mister Jarsper.” 

Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the 
silence, and the jargon is yelped out : 

“ Widdy widdy wen ! 

I _ ket — ches — Im — out — ar — ter — ten. 

Widdy widdy wy ! 

Then — E — don’ t — go — then'— I — shy — 

AYiddy Widdy Wake-cock warning ! ” 

Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral 
wall, and the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the 
moonlight. 

“ What ! Is that baby-devil on the watch there ! ” cries Jasper 
in a fury : so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older 


452 


THE. MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


devil himself. “ I shall shed the blood of that impish wretch ! I 
know I shall do it ! ” Regardless of the fire, though it hits him 
more than once, he rushes at Deputy, collars him, and tries to bring 
him across. But Deputy is not to be so easily brought across. 
With a diabolical insight into the strongest part of his position, he 
is no sooner taken by the throat than he curls up his legs, forces 
his assailant to hang him, as it were, and gurgles in his throat, 
and screws his body, and twists, as already undergoing the first 
agonies of strangulation. There is nothing for it but to drop him. 
He instantly gets himself together, backs over to Durdles, and cries 
to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front of his mouth with 
rage and malice : 

“ I’ll blind yer, s’elp me ! I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me ! If 
I don’t have yer eyesight, bellows me ! ” At the same time dodg- 
ing behind Durdles, and snarling at Jasper, now from this side of 
him, and now from that : prepared, if pounced upon, to dart away 
in all manner of curvilinear directions, and, if run down after all, i 
to grovel in the dust, and cry : “ Now, hit me when I’m down ! 
Do it ! ” 

“Don’t hurt the boy. Mister Jarsper,” urges Durdles, shielding 
him. “ Recollect yourself.” 

“ He followed us to-night, when we first came here ! ” 

“Yer lie, I didn’t ! ” replies Deputy, in his one form of polite 
contradiction. 

“ He has been prowling near us ever since ! ” 

“Yer lie, I haven’t,” returns Deputy. “I’d only jist come out i 
for my ’elth when I see you two a coming out of the Kinfreederel. I 
If 

“I — ket — ches — Im — out — ar — ter — ten !” I 

(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Dur- “ 
dies), “it ain’t my fault, is itT’ 

“Take him home, then,” retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with 
a strong check upon himself, “ and let my eyes be rid of the sight : 
of you ! ” 

Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, 
and his commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins . 
stoning that respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant 
ox. Mr. Jasper goes to his gatehouse, brooding. And thus, as i 
everything comes to an end, the unaccountable expedition comes to ! 
an end — for the time. i 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


453 


CHAPTER XIIL 

BOTH AT THEIR BEST. 

Miss Twinkleton’s establishment was about to undergo a 
serene hush. The Christmas recess was at hand. What had once, 
and at no remote period, been called, even by the erudite Miss 
Twinkleton herself, “the half ; ” but what was now called, as being 
more elegant, and more strictly collegiate, “the term,” would 
expire to-morrow. A noticeable relaxation of discipline had for 
some few days pervaded the Nuns’ House. Club suppers had 
occurred in the bedrooms, and a dressed tongue had been carved 
with a pair of scissors, and handed round with the curling tongs. 
Portions of marmalade had likewise been distributed on a service 
of plates constructed of curlpaper ; and cowslip wine had been 
quatfed from the small squat measuring glass in which little Rick- 
itts (a junior of weakly constitution) took her steel drops daily. 
The housemaids had been bribed with various fragments of riband, 
and sundry pairs of shoes more or less down at heel, to make no 
mention of crumbs in the beds ; the airiest costumes had been worn 
on these festive occasions; and the daring Miss Ferdinand had 
even surprised the company with a sprightly solo on the comb-and- 
curlpaper, until suffocated in her own pillow by two flowing-haired 
executioners. 

Nor were these the only tokens of dispersal. Boxes appeared 
in the bedrooms (where they were capital at other times), and a 
surprising amount of packing took place, out of all proportion to 
the amount packed. Largess, in the form of odds and ends of cold 
cream and pomatum, and also of hairpins, was freely distributed 
among the attendants. On charges of inviolable secrecy, confi- 
dences were interchanged respecting golden youth of England 
expected to call, “at home,” on the first opportunity. Miss 
Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her 
part, acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden 
youth ; but this young lady was outvoted by an immense majority. 

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made 
a point of honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts 
should be encouraged by all possible means. This compact inva- 
riably broke down, and all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, 
and got up very early. 

The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day 
of departure ; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs. Tisher, 
held a drawing-room in her own apartment (the globes already cov- 
ered with brown Holland), where glasses of white wine and plates 


454 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


of cut pound-cake were discovered on the table. Miss Twinkleton 
then said : Ladies, another revolving year had brought us round to 
that festive period at which the first feelings of our nature bounded 
in our — Miss Twinkleton was annually going to add “bosoms,” 
but annually stopped on the brink of that expression, and substi- 
tuted “ hearts.” Hearts ; our hearts. Hem ! Again a revolving 
year, ladies, had brought us to a pause in our studies — let us hope our 
greatly advanced studies — and, like the mariner in his bark, the 
warrior in his tent, the captive in his dungeon, and the traveller in 
his various conveyances, we yearned for home. Did we say, on 
such an occasion, in the opening words of Mr. Addison’s impressive 
tragedy : 

“ The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, 

And heavily in clouds brings on the day, 

The great, th’ important day — ? ” 

Not so. From horizon to zenith all was couleur de rose, for all was 
redolent of our relations and friends. Might ive find them prosper- 
ing as we expected ; might they find us prospering as they expected ! 
Ladies, we would now, with our love to one another, wish one an- 
other good bye, and happiness, until we met again. And when the 
time should come for our resumption of those pursuits which (here 
a general depression set in all round), pursuits which, pursuits wdiicli ; 
— then let us ever remember what was said by the Spartan General, 
in words too trite for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous 
to specify. 

The handmaidens of the establishment, in their best caps, then 
handed the trays, and the young ladies sipped and crumbled, and 
the bespoken coaches began to choke the street. Then leave-tak- 
ing was not long about ; and Miss Twinkleton, in saluting each 
young lady’s cheek, confided to her an exceedingly neat letter, 
addressed to her next friend at law, “ with Miss Twinkleton’s best 
compliments ” in the corner. This missive she handed with an air 
as if it had not the least connection with the bill, but were some- 
thing in. the nature of a delicate and joyful surprise. 

So many times had Rosa seen such dispersals, and so very little 
did she know of any other Home, that she was contented to remain 
where she was, and was even better contented than ever before, 
having her latest friend with her. And yet her latest friendship 
had a blank place in it of which she could not fail to be sensible. 
Helena Landless, having been a party to her brother’s revelation 
about Rosa, and having entered into that compact of silence with 
Mr. Crisparkle, shrank from any allusion to Edwin Drood’s name. 
Why she so avoided it, was mysterious to Rosa, but she perfectly 



GOOD liVl' llOSKBUD DARLING 





456 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


perceived the fact. But for the fact,, she might have relieved her 
own little perplexed heart of some of its doubts and hesitations, by 
taking Helena into her confidence. As it was, she had no such vent : 
she could only ponder on her own difficulties, and wonder more and 
more why this avoidance of Edwin’s name should last, now that 
she knew — for so much Helena had told her — that a good under- 
standing was to be reestablished between the two young men, when 
Edwin came down. 

It would have made a pretty picture, so many pretty girls kiss- 
ing Rosa in the cold porch of the Nuns’ House, and that sunny 
little creature peeping out of it (unconscious of sly faces carved 
on spout and gable peeping at her), and waving farewells to the 
departing coaches, as if she represented the spirit of rosy youth 
abiding in the place to keep it bright and warm in its desertion. 
The hoarse High Street became musical with the cry, in various sil- 
very voices, “ Gfood bye. Rosebud darling ! ” and the effigy of Mr. Sap- 
sea’s father overHhe opposite doorway seemed to say to mankind : 
“ Gentlemen, favour me with your attention to this charming little 
last lot left behind, and bid with a spirit worthy of the occasion ! ” 
Then the staid street, so unwontedly sparkling, youthful, and fresh 
for few rippling moments, ran dry, and Cloisterham was itself again. 

If Rosebud in her bower now waited Edwin Drood’s coming 
with an uneasy heart, Edwin for his part was uneasy too. 
With far less force of purpose in his composition than the childish 
beauty, crowned by acclamation fairy queen of Miss Twinkleton’s 
establishment, he had a conscience, and Mr. Grewgious had pricked 
it. That gentleman’s steady convictions of what was right and 
what was wrong in such a case as his, were neither to be frowned 
aside nor laughed aside. They would not be moved. But for the 
dinner in Staple Inn, and but for the ring he carried in the breast 
pocket of his coat, he would have drifted into their wedding-day 
without another pause for real thought, loosely trusting that all 
would go well, left alone. But that serious putting him on his truth 
to the living and the dead had brought him to a check. He must 
either give the ring to Rosa, or he must take it back. Once put 
into this narrowed way of action, it was curious that he began to con- 
sider Rosa’s claims upon him more unselfishly than he had ever 
considered them before, and began to be less sure of himself than 
he had ever been in all his easy-going days. 

“ I will be guided by what she says, and by how we get on,” 
was his decision, walking from the gatehouse to the Nuns’ House. 
“ Whatever comes of it, I will bear his words in mind, and try to 
be true to the living and the dead.” 

Rosa was dressed for walking. She expected him. It was a 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 457 

bright frosty day, and Miss Twinkleton had already graciously 
sanctioned fresh air. Thus they got out together before it became 
necessary for either Miss Twinkleton, or the deputy high-priest Mrs. 
Tisher, to lay even so much as one of those usual offerings on the 
shrine of Propriety. 

“My dear Eddy,” said Rosa, when they had turned out of the 
High Street, and had got among the quiet walks in the neighbour- 
hood of the Cathedral and the river : “I want to say something 
very serious to you. I have been thinking about it for a long, long 
time.” 

“ I want to be serious with you too, Rosa dear. I mean to be 
serious and earnest.” 

“ Thank you, Eddy. And you will not think me unkind because 
I begin, will you ? You will not think I speak for myself only, 
because I speak first ? That would not be generous, would it ? 
And I know you are generous ! ” 

He said, “I hope I am not ungenerous to you, Rosa.” He 
called her Pussy no more. Never again. 

“And there is no fear,” pursued Rosa, “of our quarrelling, is 
there? Because, Eddy,” clasping her hand on his arm, “we have 
so much reason to be very lenient to each other ! ” 

“We will be, Rosa.” 

“ That’s a dear good boy ! Eddy, let us be courageous. Let us 
change to brother and sister from this day forth.” 

“ Never be husband and wife ? ” 

“Never ! ” 

Neither spoke again for a little while. But after that pause he 
said, with some effort : 

“ Of course I know that this has been in both our minds, Rosa, 
and of course I am in honour bound to confess freely that it does 
not originate with you.” 

“No, nor with you, dear,” she returned, with pathetic earnest- 
ness. “ That sprung up between us. You are not truly happy in 
our engagement ; I am not truly happy in it. 0, I am so sorry, 
so sorry ! ” And there she broke into tears. 

“lam deeply sorry too, Rosa. Deeply sorry for you.” 

“ And I for you, poor boy ! And I for you ! ” 

This pure young feeling, this gentle and forbearing feeling of 
each towards the other, brought with it its reward in a softening 
light that seemed to shine on their position. The relations be- 
tween them did not look wilful, or capricious, or a failure, in such 
a light ; they became elevated into something more self-denying, 
honourable, affectionate, and true. 

“If we knew yesterday,” said Rosa, as she dried her eyes, “and 


458 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


we did know yesterday, and on many, many yesterdays, that we 
were far from right together in those relations which were not of our 
own choosing, what better could we do to-day than change them ? 
It is natural that we should be sorry, and you see how sorry we 
both are ; but how much better to be sorry now than then ? ” 

“When, Rosa?” 

“ When it would be too late. And then we should be angry, be- 
sides.” 

Another silence fell upon them. 

“And you know,” said Rosa innocently, “you couldn’t like me 
then ; and you can always like me now, for I shall not be a drag 
upon you, or a worry to you. And I can always like you now, and 
your sister will not tease or trifle with you. I often did when I 
was not your sister, and I beg your pardon for it.” 

“Don’t let us come to that, Rosa; or I shall want more pardon- 
ing than I like to think of.” 

“No, indeed, Eddy; you are too hard, my generous boy, upon 
yourself. Let us sit down, brother, on these ruins, and let me tell 
you how it was with us. I think I know, for I have considered 
about it very much since you were here last time. You liked me, 
didn’t you? You thought I was a nice little thing?” 

“ Everybody thinks that, Rosa.” 

“ Do they ? ” She knitted her brow musingly for a moment, 
and then flashed out with the bright little induction : “ Well, but say 
they do. Surely it was not enough that you should think of me 
only as other people did ; now, was it ? ” 

The point was not to be got over. It was not enough. 

“ And that is just what I mean ; that is just how it was with 
us,” said Rosa. “You liked me very well, and you had grown 
used to me, and had grown used to the idea of our being married. 
You accepted the situation as an inevitable kind of thing, didn’t 
you? It was to be, you thought, and why discuss or dis- 
pute it?” 

It was new and strange to him to have himself presented to him- 
self so clearly, in a glass of her holding up. He had always pat- 
ronised her, in his superiority to her share of woman’s wit. Was 
that but another instance of something radically amiss in the 
terms on which they had been gliding towards a lifelong bondage ? 

“ All this that I say of you is true of me as well, Eddy. Un- 
less it was, I might not be bold enough to say it. Only, the dif- 
ference between us was, that by little and little there crept into 
my mind a habit of thinking about it, instead of dismissing it. 
My life is not so busy as yours, you see, and I have not so many 
things to think of. So I thought about it very much, and I cried 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


459 


about it very much too (though that was not your fault, poor boy) ; 
when all at once my guardian came down, to prepare for my leav- 
ing the Nuns’ House. I tried to hint to him that I was not quite 
settled in my mind, but I hesitated and failed, and he didn’t under- 
stand me. But he is a good, good man. And he put before me 
so kindly, and yet so strongly, how seriously we ought to consider, 
in our circumstances, that I resolved to speak to you the next 
moment we were alone and grave. And if I seem to come to it 
easily just now, because I came to it all at once, don’t think it was 
so really, Eddy, for 0, it was very, very hard, and 0 I am very, 
very sorry ! ” 

Her full heart broke into tears again. He put his arm about 
her waist, and they walked by the river-side together. 

“ Your guardian has spoken to me too, Rosa dear. I saw him 
before I left London.” His right hand was in his breast, seeking 
the ring ; but he checked it, as he thought If I am to take it 
back, why should I tell her of it ? ” 

“And that made you more serious about it, didn’t it, Eddy? 
And if I had not spoken to you, as I have, you would have spoken 
to me ? I hope you can tell me so ? I don’t like it to be all my 
doing, though it so much better for us.” 

“Yes, I should have spoken ; I should have put everything be- 
fore you ; I came intending to* do it. But I never could have 
spoken to you as you have spoken to me, Rosa.” 

“ Don’t say you mean so coldly or unkindly, Eddy, please, if you 
can help it.” 

“ I mean so sensibly and delicately, so wisely and aftectionately.” 

“ That’s my dear brother ! ” She kissed his hand in a little 
rapture. “The dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,” added 
Rosa, laughing, with the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes. 
“ They have looked forward to it so, poor pets ! ” 

“ Ah ! but I fear it will be a worse disappointment to Jack,” 
said Edwin Drood, with a start. “ I never thought of Jack ! ” 

Her swift and intent look at him as he said the words could no 
more be recalled than a flash of lightning can. But it appeared as 
though she would have instantly recalled it, if she could ; for she 
looked down, confused, and breathed quickly. 

“You don’t doubt its being a blow to Jack, Rosa?” 

She merely replied, and that evasively and hurriedly : Why 
should she ? She had not thought about it. He seemed, to her, 
to have so little to do with it. 

“ My dear child ! can you suppose that any one so wrapped 
up in another — Mrs. Tope’s expression ; not mine — as Jack is 
in me, could fail to be struck all of a heap by such a sudden and 


460 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


complete change in my life ? I say sudden, because it will be sud- 
den to him, you know.” 

She nodded twice or thrice, and her lips parted as if she would 
have assented. But she uttered no sound, and her breathing was 
no slower. 

“ How shall I tell Jack ? ” said Edwin, ruminating. If he had 
been less occupied with the thought, he must have seen lier singu- 
lar emotion. “ I never thought of Jack. It must be broken to 
him, before the town-crier knows it. I dine with the dear fellow 
to-morrow and next day — Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — 
but it would never do to spoil his feast-days. He always worries 
about me, and moddley-coddleys in the merest trifles. The news 
is sure to overset him. How on earth shall this be broken to 
Jack?” 

“ He must be told, I suppose ? ” said Rosa. 

“ My dear Rosa ! who ought to be in our confldence, if not 
Jack?” 

“ My guardian promised to come down, if I should write and ask 
him. I am going to do so. Would you like to leave it to him ? ” 

“ A bright idea ! ” cried Edwin. “ The other trustee. Nothing 
more natural. He comes down, he goes to Jack, he relates what 
we have agreed upon, and he states our case better than we could. 
He has already spoken feelingly *to you, he has already spoken 
feelingly to me, and he’ll put the whole thing feelingly to Jack. 
That’s it ! I am not a coward, Rosa, but to tell you a secret, I 
am a little afraid of Jack.” 

“ No, no ! you are not afraid of him ! ” cried Rosa, turning white, 
and clasping her hands. 

“ Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the tur- 
ret ? ” said Edwin, rallying her. “ My dear girl ! ” 

“You frightened me.” 

“ Most unintentionally, but I am as sorry as if I had meant to do 
it. ’ Could you possibly suppose for a moment, from any loose way 
of speaking of mine, that I was literally afraid of the dear fond 
fellow ? What I mean is, that he is subject to a kind of paroxysm, 
or flt — I saw him in it once — and I don’t know but that so 
great a surprise, coming upon him direct from me whom he is so 
wrapped up in, migh,t bring it on perhaps. Which — and this is 
the secret I was going to tell you — is another reason for your 
guardian’s making the communication. He is so steady, precise, 
and exact, that he will talk Jack’s thoughts into shape, in no time : 
whereas with me Jack is always impulsive and hurried, and, I may 
say, almost womanish.” 

Rosa seemed convinced. Perhaps from her own very different 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 461 

point of view of “Jack,” she felt comforted and protected by the 
interposition of Mr. Grewgious between herself and him. 

And now, Edwin Brood’s right hand closed again upon the ring 
in its little case, and again was checked by the consideration : “It 
is certain, now, that I am to give it back to him ; then why should 
I tell her of it ? ” That pretty sympathetic nature which could be 
so sorry for him in the blight of their childish hopes of happiness 
together, and could so quietly find itself alone in a new world to 
weave fresh wreaths of such fiowers as it might prove to bear, the 
old world’s flowers being withered, would be grieved by those sorrow- 
ful jewels ; and to what purpose ? Why should it be ? They were 
but a sign of broken joys and baseless projects ; in their very 
beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of men had said) almost a 
cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of humanity, which are able 
to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle dust. Let them be. 
He would restore them to her guardian when he came down ; he 
in his turn w’ould restore them to the cabinet from which he had 
unwillingly taken them ; and there, like old letters or old vows, or 
other records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be 
disregarded, until, being valuable, they were sold into circulation 
again, to repeat their former round. 

Let them be. Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast. How- 
ever distinctly or indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he ar- 
rived at the conclusion. Let them be. Among the mighty store 
of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in 
the vast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain 
forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the 
foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force 
to hold and drag. 

They walked on by the river. They began to speak of their 
separate plans. He would quicken his departure from England, 
and she would remain where she was, at least as long as Helena 
remained. The poor dear girls should have their disappointment 
broken to them gently, and, as the first preliminary. Miss Twinkle- 
ton should be confided in by Rosa, even in advance of the reappear- 
ance of Mr. Grewgious. It should be made clear in all quarters 
that she and Edwin were the best of friends. There had never been 
so serene an understanding between them since they were first af- 
fianced. And yet there was one reservation on each side ; on hers, 
that she intended through her guardian to withdraw herself im- 
mediately from the tuition of her music-master ; on his, that he 
did already entertain some wandering speculations whether it might 
ever come to pass that he would know more of Miss Landless. 

The bright frosty day declined as they walked and spoke to- 


462 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


gether. The sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old 
city lay red before them, as their walk drew to a close. The 
moaning water cast its seaweed duskily at their feet, when they 
turned to leave its margin ; and the rooks hovered above them with 
hoarse cries, darker splashes in the darkening air. 

“ I will prepare Jack for my flitting soon,” said Edwin, in a 
low yoice, “ and I will but see your guardian when he comes, and 
then go before they speak together. It will be better done with- 
out my being by. Don’t you think so ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“We know we have done right, Rosa?” 

“Yes.” 

“We know we are better so, even now ? ” 

“And shall be far, far better so by-and-bye.” 

Still there was that lingering tenderness in their hearts towards 
the old positions they were relinquishing, that they prolonged their 
parting. When they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, 
where they had last sat together, they stopped as by consent, and 
Rosa raised her face to his, as she had never raised it in the old 
days ; — for they were old already. 

“ God bless you, dear ! Good Rye ! ” 

“ God bless you, dear ! Good bye ! ” 

They kissed each other fervently. 

“ Now, please take me home, Eddy, and let me be by myself.” 

“Don’t look round, Rosa,” he cautioned her, as he drew her arm 
through his, and led her away. “ Didn’t you see Jack ? ” 

“No! Where?” 

“ Under the trees. He saw us, as we took leave of each other. 
Poor fellow 1 he little thinks we have parted. This will be a blow 
to him, I am much afraid 1 ” 

She hurried on, without resting, and hurried on until they had 
passed under the gatehouse into the street ; once there, she asked : 

“ Has he followed us ? You can look without seeming to. Is 
he behind?” 

“ No. Yes, he is 1 He has just passed out under the gateway. 
The dear sympathetic old fellow likes to keep us in sight. I am 
afraid he will be bitterly disappointed 1 ” 

She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and 
the gate soon opened. Before going in, she gave him one last wide 
wondering look, as if she would have asked him with imploring 
emphasis : “ 0 ! don’t you understand ? ” And out of that look 
he vanished from her view. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


463 


CHAPTER XIV. 

WHEN SHALL THESE THKEE MEET AGAIN ? 

Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the 
streets ; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the 
faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women 
vho come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the 
city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any 
means well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking of the Cathe- 
dral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, 
are like voices of their nursery time. To such as these, it has hap- 
pened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their 
chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from 
the elm-trees in the Close : so have the rustling sounds and fresh 
scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their 
lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were 
drawing close together. 

Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there 
in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are 
daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the 
Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-button- 
holes of the Dean and Chapter. Lavish profusion is in the shops ; 
particularly in the articles of currents, raisins, spices, candied peel, 
and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is 
abroad ; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the 
greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, cul- 
minating in the figure of a Harlequin — such a very poor little 
Twelfth Cake, that one would rather call it a Twenty-fourth Cake 
or a Forty -eighth Cake — to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms 
one shilling per member. Public amusements are not wanting. 
The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reffective 
mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire 
during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt liv- 
ery-stable-keeper up the lane ; and a new grand comic Christmas 
pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre : the latter heralded 
by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying “ How do 
you do to-morrow 1 ” quite as large as life, and almost as miserably. 
In short, Cloisterham is up and doing : though from this descrip- 
tion the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded. 
From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every 
one of them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies 
(who knows nothing about it) ; and only the handmaidens ffutter 
occasionally in the windows of the latter. It is noticed, by-the- 


464 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more 
skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of 
their sex, than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkle- 
ton’s young ladies. 

Three are to meet at the gatehouse to-night. How does each 
one of the three get through the day ? 

Neville Landless, though absolved from his books for the time 
by Mr. Crisparkle — whose fresh nature is by no means insensible 
to the charms of a holiday — reads and writes in his quiet room, 
with a concentrated air, until it is two hours past noon. He then 
sits himself to clearing his table, to arranging his books, and to 
tearing up and burning his stray papers. He makes a clean sweep 
of all untidy accumulations, puts all his drawers in order, and leaves 
no note or scrap of paper undestroyed, save such memoranda as bear 
directly on his studies. This done, he turns to his wardrobe, selects 
a few articles of ordinary wear — among them, change of stout 
shoes and socks for walking — and packs these in a knapsack. 
This knapsack is new, and he bought it in the High Street yester- 
day. He also purchased, at the same time and at the same place, 
a heavy walking-stick : strong in the handle for the grip of the 
hand, and iron-shod. He tries this, swings it, poises it, and lays 
it by, with the knapsack, on a window-seat. By this time his 
arrangements are complete. 

He dresses for going out, and is in the act of going — indeed has 
left his room, and has met the Minor Canon on the staircase, com- 
ing out of his bedroom upon the same story — when he turns back 
again for his walking-stick, thinking he will carry it now. Mr. 
Crisparkle, who has paused on the staircase, sees it in his hand on 
his immediately reappearing, takes it from him, and asks him 
with a smile how he chooses a stick ? 

“Really I don’t know that I understand the subject,” he 
answers. “I chose it for its weight.” 

“Much too heavy, Neville ; much too heavy.” 

“ To rest upon in a long walk, sir ? ” 

“ Rest upon ? ” repeats Mr. Crisparkle, throwing himself into 
pedestrian form. “You don’t rest upon it; you merely balance 
with it.” 

“ I shall know better, with practice, sir. I have not lived in a 
walking country, you know.” 

“ True,” says Mr. Crisparkle. “ Get into a little training, and 
we will have a few score miles together. I should leave you 
nowhere now. Do you come back before dinner % ” 

“ I think not, as we dine early.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


465 


Mr. Crisparkle gives him a bright nod and a cheerful good bye ; 
expressing (not without intention) absolute confidence and ease. 

Neville repairs to the Nuns’ House, and requests that Miss 
Landless may be informed that her brother is there, by appoint- 
ment. He waits at the gate, not even crossing the threshold ; for 
he is on his parole not to put himself in Rosa’s way. 

His sister is at least as mindful of the obligation they have 
taken on themselves as he can be, and loses not a moment in join- 
ing him. They meet affectionately, avoid lingering there, and 
walk towards the upper inland country. 

“I am not going to tread upon forbidden ground, Helena,” says 
Neville, when they have walked some distance and are turning; 
“you will understand in another moment that I cannot help re- 
ferring to — what shall I say? — my infatuation.” 

“ Had you not better avoid it, Neville? You know that I can 
hear nothing.” 

“ You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and 
heard with approval.” 

“ Yes ; I can hear so much.” 

“ Well, it is this. I am not only unsettled and unhappy my- 
self, but I am conscious of unsettling and interfering with other 
people. How do I know that, but for my unfortunate presence, 
you, and — and — the rest of that former party, our engaging 
guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully in Minor Canon 
Corner to-morrow ? Indeed it probably would be so. I can see 
too well that I am not high in the old lady’s opinion, and it is easy 
to understand what an irksome clog I must be upon the hospitali- 
ties of her orderly house — especially at this time of year — 
when I must be kept asunder from this person, and there is such 
a reason for my not being brought into contact with that person, 
and an unfavourable reputation has preceded me with such another 
person, and so on. I have put this very gently to Mr. Crisparkle, 
for you know his self-denying ways ; but still I have put it. What 
I have laid much greater stress upon at the same time, is, that I am 
engaged in a miserable struggle with myself, and that a little change 
and absence may enable me to come through it the better. So, 
the weather being bright and hard, I am going on a walking expedi- 
tion, and intend taking myself out of everybody’s way (my own 
included, I hope) to-morrow morning.” 

“ When to come back ? ” 

“ In a fortnight.” 

“ And going quite alone ? ” 

“ I am much better without company, even if there were any 
one but you to bear me company, my dear Helena.” 

2 H 


46C) THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

“Mr. Crisparkle entirely agrees, you say?” 

“ Entirely. I am not sure but tWt at first he was inclined to 
think it rather a moody scheme, and one that might do a brooding 
mind harm. But we took a moonlight walk last Monday night, to 
talk it over at leisure, and I represented the case to him as it really 
is. I showed him that I do want to conquer myself, and that, 
this evening well got over, it is surely better that I should be 
away from here just nowj than here. I could hardly help meeting 
certain people walking together here, and that could do no good, 
and is certainly not the way to forget. A fortnight hence, that 
chance will probably be over, for the time ; and when it again 
arises for the last time, why, I can again go away. Farther, I 
really do feel hopeful of bracing exercise and wholesome fatigue. 
You know that Mr. Crisparkle allows such things their full weight 
in the preservation of his own sound mind in his own sound body, 
and that his just spirit is not likely to maintain one' set of natural 
laws for himself and another for me. He yielded to my view of 
the matter, when convinced that I was honestly in earnest ; and so, 
wdth his full consent, I start to-morrow morning. Early enough 
to be not only out of the streets, but out of hearing of the bells, 
when the good people go to church.” 

Helena thinks it over, and thinks well of it. Mr. Crisparkle 
doing so, she would do so ; but she does originally, out of her oAvn 
mind, think well of it, as a healthy project, denoting a sincere en- 
deavour and an active attempt at self-correction. She is inclined 
to pity him, poor fellow, for going away solitary on the great 
Christmas festival ; but she feels it much more to the purpose to 
encourage him. And she does encourage him. 

He will write to her ? 

He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his 
adventures. 

Does he send clothes on in advance of him ? 

“ My dear Helena, no. Travel like a pilgrim, with wallet and 
staff. My wallet — or my knapsack — is packed, and ready for 
strapping on ; and here is my staff ! ” 

He hands it to her ; she makes the same remark as Mr. Cri- 
sparkle, that it is very heavy ; and gives it back to him, asking what 
wood it is ? Iron-wood. 

Up to this point he has been extremely cheerful. Perhaps, the 
having to carry his case with her, and therefore to present it in its 
brightest aspect, has roused his spirits. Perhaps, the having done 
so with success, is followed by a revulsion. As the day closes in, 
and the city-lights begin to spring up before them, he grows 
depressed. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 467 

“ I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.” 

“Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it? 
Think how soon it will be over.” 

“How soon it will be over!” he repeats gloomily. “Yes. 
But I don’t like it.” 

There may be a moment’s awkwardness, she cheeringly represents 
to him, but it can only last a moment. He is quite sure of himself. 

“ I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself,” 
he answers her. 

“ How strangely you speak, dear ! What do you mean ? ” 

“ Helena, I don’t know. I only know that I don’t like it. 
What a strange dead weight there is in the air ! ” 

She calls his attention to those copperous clouds beyond the 
river, and says that the wind is rising. He scarcely speaks again, 
until he takes leave of her, at the gate of the Nuns’ House. She 
does not immediately enter, when they have parted, but remains 
looking after him along the street. Twice he passes the gatehouse, 
reluctant to enter. At length, the Cathedral clock chiming one 
quarter, with a rapid turn he hurries in. 

And so he goes up the postern-stair. 

Edwin Drood passes a solitary day. Something of deeper 
moment than he had thought, has gone out of his life ; and in the 
silence of his own chamber he wept for it last night. Though 
the image of Miss Landless still hovers in the background of his 
mind, the pretty little affectionate creature so much firmer and 
wiser than he had supposed, occupies its stronghold. It is with 
some misgiving of his own unworthiness that he thinks of her, 
and of what they might have been to one another, if he had been 
more in earnest some time ago j if he had set a higher value on 
her; if, instead of accepting his lot in life as an inheritance of 
course, he had studied the right way to its appreciation and 
enhancement. And still, for all this, and though there is a sharp 
heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that 
handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind. 

That was a curious look of Rosa’s when they parted at the gate. 
Did it mean that she saw below the surface of his thoughts, and 
down into their twilight depths? Scarcely that, for it was a 
look of astonished and keen inquiry. He decides that he cannot 
understand it, though it was remarkably expressive. 

As he only waits for Mr. Grewgious now, and will depart imme- 
diately after having seen him, he takes a sauntering leave of the 
ancient city and its neighbourhood. He recalls the time when 
Rosa and he walked here or there, mere children, full of the dig- 


468 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

nity of being engaged. Poor children ! he thinks, with a pitying 
sadness. 

Finding that his watch has stopped, he turns into the jeweller’s 
shop, to have it wound and set. The jeweller is knowing on the 
subject of a bracelet, which he begs leave to submit, in a general 
and quite aimless way. It would suit (he considers) a young bride, 
to perfection ; especially if of a rather diminutive style of beauty. 
Finding the bracelet but coldly looked at, the jeweller invites 
attention to a tray of rings for gentlemen ; here is a style of ring, 
now, he remarks — a very chaste signet — which gentlemen are 
much given to purchasing, when changing their condition. A ring 
of a very responsible appearance. With the date of their wedding- 
day engraved inside, several gentlemen have preferred it to any 
other kind of memento. 

The rings are as coldly viewed as the bracelet. Edwin tells the 
tempter that he wears no jewellery but his watch and chain, which 
were his father’s ; and his shirt-pin. 

“ That I was aware of,” is the jeweller’s reply, “for Mr. Jasper 
dropped in for a watch-glass the other day, and, in fact, I showed 
these articles to him, remarking that if he should wish to make 
a present to a gentleman relative, on any particular occasion — 
But he said with a smile that he had an inventory in his mind of 
all the jewellery his gentleman relative ever wore ; namely, his watch 
and chain, and his shirt-pin.” Still (the jeweller considers) that 
might not apply to all times, though applying to the present time. 
“ Twenty minutes past two, Mr. Drood, I set your watch at. Let 
me recommend you not to let it run down, sir.” 

Edwin takes his watch, puts it on, and goes out, thinking : 
“Dear old Jack ! If I were to make an extra crease in my neck- 
cloth, he would think it worth noticing ! ” 

He strolls about and about, to pass the time until the dinner 
hour. It somehow happens that Cloisterham seems reproachful to 
him to-day ; has fault to find with him, as if he had not used it 
well ; but is far more pensive with him than angry. His wonted 
carelessness is replaced by a wistful looking at, and dwelling upon, 
all the old landmarks. He will soon be far away, and may never 
see them again, he thinks. Poor youth ! Poor youth ! 

As dusk draws on, he paces the Monks’ Vineyard. He has 
walked to and fro, full half an hour by the Cathedral chimes, and 
it has closed in dark, before he becomes quite aware of a woman 
crouching on the ground near a wicket gate in a corner. The gate 
commands a cross bye-path, little used in the gloaming ; and the 
figure must have been there all the time, though he has but gradm 
ally and lately made it out. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


469 


He strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket. By the 
light of a lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard 
appearance, and that her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and 
that her eyes are staring — with an unwinking, blind sort of stead- 
fastness — before her. 

Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and 
having bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged 
people he has met, he at once bends down, and speaks to this 
woman. 

“Are you ill?” 

“No, deary,” she answers, without looking at him, and with no 
departure from her strange blind stare. 

“ Are you blind ? ” 

“No, deary.” 

“Are you lost, homeless, faint? What is the matter, that you 
stay here in the cold so long, without moving ? ” 

By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until 
it can rest upon him ; and then a curious film passes over her, and 
she begins to shake. 

He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in 
a dread amazement ; for he seems to know her. 

“ Good Heaven ! ” he thinks, next moment. “ Like Jack that 
night ! ” 

As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers : 
“ My lungs is weakly ; my lungs is dreffle bad. Poor me, poor me, 
my cough is rattling diy ! ” and coughs in confirmation horribly. 

“ Where do you come from ? ” 

“ Come from London, deary.” (Her cough still rending her.) 

“ Where are you going to ? ” 

“ Back to London, deary. I came here, looking for a needle in 
a haystack, and I ain’t found it. Look’ee, deary ; give me three- 
and-sixpence, and don’t you be afeard for me. I’ll get back to 
London then, and trouble no one. I’m in a business. — Ah, me ! 
It’s slack, it’s slack, and times is very bad ! — but I can make a 
shift to live by it.” 

“ Do you eat opium ? ” 

“ Smokes it,” she replies with difficulty, still racked by her cough. 
“ Give me three-and-sixpence, and I’ll lay it out well, and get back. 
If you don’t give me three-and-sixpence, don’t give me a brass 
farden. And if you do give me three-and-sixpence, deary. I’ll tell 
you something.” 

He counts the money from his pocket, and puts it in her hand. 
She instantly clutches it tight, and rises to her feet with a croak- 
ing laugh of satisfaction. 


470 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Bless ye ! Hark’ee, dear genl’inn. What’s your Chris’en 
name 'i ” 

“ Edwin.” 

“Edwin, Edwin, Edwin,” she repeats, trailing off into a drowsy 
repetition of the word ; and then asks suddenly : “Is the short 
of that name Eddy ? ” 

“It is sometimes called so,” he replies, with the colour starting 
to his face. 

“Don’t sweethearts call it so ? ” she asks, pondering. 

“ How should I know ? ” 

“ Haven’t you a sweetheart, upon your soul ? ” 

“ None.” 

She is moving away, with another “Bless ye, and thank’ee, 
deary!” when he adds: “You were to tell me something; you. 
may as well do so.” 

“ So I was, so I was. Well, then. Whisper. You be thank- 
ful that your name ain’t Ned.” 

He looks at her quite steadily, as he asks : “ Why ? ” 

“Because it’s a bad name to have just now.” 

“ How a bad name ? ” 

“ A threatened name. A dangerous name.” 

“ The proverb says that threatened men live long,” he tells her, 
lightly. 

“Then Ned — so threatened is he, wherever he may be while I 
am a talking to you, deary — should live to all eternity 1” replies 
the woman. 

She has leaned forward to say it in his ear, with her forefinger 
shaking before his eyes, and now huddles herself together, and 
with another “Bless ye, and thank’ee!” goes away in the dire(^ 
tion of the Travellers’ Lodging House. a 

This is not an inspiriting close to a dull day. Alone, in a^^ 
sequestered place, surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay, 
it rather has a tendency to call a shudder into being. He 
makes for the better-lighted streets, and resolves as he walks 
on to say nothing of this to-night, but to mention it to Jack 
(who alone calls him Ned), as an odd coincidence, to-morrow; 
of course only as a coincidence, and not as anything better worth 
remembering. 

Still, it holds to him, as many things much better worth remem- 
bering never did. He has another mile or so, to linger out before 
the dinner-hour ; and, when he walks over the bridge and by the 
river, the woman’s words are in the rising wind, in the angry sky, 
in the troubled water, in the flickering lights. There is some 
solemn echo of them even in the Cathedral chime, which strikes a 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 471 

sudden surprise ^to his heart as he turns in under the archway of 
the gatehouse. 

• And so he goes up the postern-stair. 

J ohn J asper passes a more agreeable and cheerful day than 
either of his guests. Having no music-lessons to give in the holi- 
day season, his time is his own, but for the Cathedral services. 
He is early among the shopkeepers, ordering little table luxuries 
that his nephew likes. His nephew will not be with him long, he 
tells his provision-dealers, and so must be petted and made much of. 
While out on his hospitable preparations, he looks in on Mr. Sap- 
sea; and mentions that dear Ned, and that inflammable young 
spark of Mr. Crisparkle’s, are to dine at the gatehouse to-day, 
and make up their difference. Mr. Sapsea is by no means friendly 
towards the inflammable young spark. He says that his complex- 
ion is “ Un-English.” And when Mr. Sapsea has once declared any- 
thing to be Un-English, he considers that thing everlastingly sunk 
in the bottomless pit. 

John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he 
knows right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, 
and that he has a subtle trick of being right. Mr. Sapsea (by a 
very remarkable coincidence) is of exactly that opinion. 

Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day. In the pathetic sup- 
plication to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite aston- 
ishes his fellows by his melodious power. He has never sung diffi- 
cult music with such skill and harmony, as in this day’s Anthem. 
His nervous temperament is occasionally prone to take difficult 
music a little too quickly ; to-day, his time is perfect. 

These results are probably attained through a grand composure 
of the spirits. The mere mechanism of his throat is a ‘little tender, 
for he wears, both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary 
dress, a large black scarf of strong close-woven silk, slung loosely 
round his neck. But his composure is so noticeable, that Mr. Cri- 
sparkle speaks of it as they come out from Vespers. 

“ I must thank you, Jasper, for the pleasure with which I have 
heard you to-day. Beautiful ! Delightful ! You could not have 
so outdone yourself, I hope, without being wonderfully well.” 

“ I am wonderfully well.” 

“ Nothing unequal,” says the Minor Canon, with a smooth motion 
of his hand : “ nothing unsteady, nothing forced, nothing avoided ; 
all thoroughly done in a masterly manner, with perfect self-command.” 

“ Thank you. I hope so, if it is not too much to say.” 

“ One would think, Jasper, you had been trying a new medicine 
for that occasional indisposition of yours.” 


472 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ No, really ? That’s well observed ; for I have.” 

“Then stick to it, my good fellow,” says Mr.'Crisparkle, clap- 
ping him on the shoulder with friendly encouragement, “stick to it.” 

“ I will.” 

“ I congratulate you,” Mr. Crisparkle pursues, as they come out 
of the Cathedral, “on all accounts.” 

“ Thank you again. I will walk round to the Corner with you, 
if you don’t object ; I have plenty of time before my company come ; 
and I want to say a word to you, which I think you will not be 
displeased to hear.” 

“ What is it ? ” 

“Well. We were speaking, the other evening, of my black 
humours.” 

Mr. Crisparkle’s face falls, and he shakes his head deploringly. 

“ I said, you know, that I should make you an antidote to those 
black humours ; and you said you hoped I would consign them to 
the flames.” 

“And I still hope so, Jasper.” 

“ With the best reason in the world ! I mean to burn this 
year’s Diary at the year’s end.” 

“Because you — ?” Mr. Crisparkle brightens greatly as he 
thus begins. 

“You anticipate me. Because I feel that I have been out of 
sorts, gloomy, bilious, brain-oppressed, whatever it may be. You 
said I had been exaggerative. So I have.” 

Mr. Crisparkle’s brightened face brightens still more. 

“ I couldn’t see it then, because I was out of sorts ; but I am in 
a healthier state now, and I acknowledge it with genuine pleasure. 
I made a great deal of a very little ; that’s the fact.” 

“It does’ me good,” cries Mr. Crisparkle, “to hear you say it ! ” 

“A man leading a monotonous life,” Jasper proceeds, “and get- 
ting his nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea 
until it loses its proportions. That was my case with the idea 
in question. So I shall burn the evidence of my case when the 
book is full, and begin the next volume with a clearer vision.” 

“ This is better,” says Mr. Crisparkle, stopping at the steps of 
his own door to shake hands, “ than I could have hoped.” 

“ Why, naturally,” returns Jasper. “You had but little reason 
to hope that I should become more like yourself. You are always 
training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, an^ you 
always are, and never change ; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, 
moping weed. However, I have got over that mope. Shall I wait, 
while you ask if Mr. Neville has left for my place ? If not, he and 
I may walk round together.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


473 


“ I think,” says Mr. Crisparkle, opening the entrance-door with 
his key, “that he left some time ago ; at least I know he left, and 
I think he has not come back. But I’ll inquire. You won’t come 
in?” 

“My company wait,” said Jasper, with a smile. 

The Minor Canon disappears, and in a few moments returns. 
As he thought, Mr. Neville has not come back ; indeed, as he re- 
members now, Mr. Neville said he would probably go straight to 
the gatehouse. 

“Bad manners in a host!” says Jasper. “My company will 
be there before me ! What will you bet that I don’t find my com- 
pany embracing ? ” 

“'I will bet — or I would, if ever I did bet,” returns Mr. Cri- 
sparkle, “ that your company will have a gay entertainer this even- 
ing.” 

Jasper nods, and laughs good night ! 

He retraces his steps to the Cathedral door, and turns down 
past it to the gatehouse. He sings, in a low voice and with deli- 
cate expression, as he walks along. It still seems as if a false note 
were not within his power to-night, and as if nothing could hurry 
or retard him. Arriving thus under the arched entrance of his 
dwelling, he pauses for an instant in the shelter to pull off that 
great black scarf, and hang it in a loop upon his arm. For that 
brief time, his face is knitted and stern. But it immediately clears, 
as he resumes his singing, and his wmy. 

And so he goes up the postern-stair. 

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on 
the margin of the tide of busy life. Softened sounds and hum of 
traffic pass it and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts ; 
but very little else goes by, save violent rushes of wind. It comes 
on to blow a boisterous gale. 

The Precincts are never particularly well lighted ; but the strong 
blasts of wind blowing out many of the lamps (in some instances 
shattering the frames too, and bringing the glass rattling to the 
ground), they are unusually dark to-night. The darkness is aug- 
mented and confused, by flying dust from the earth, dry twigs from 
the trees, and great ragged fragments from the rooks’ nests up in 
the Tower. The trees themselves so toss and creak, as this tangible 
part pf the darkness madly whirls about, that they seem in peril of 
being torn out of the earth : while ever and again a crack, and a 
rushing fall, denote that some large branch has yielded to the storm. 

No such power of wind has blown for many a winter night. 
Chimneys topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and cor- 


474 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


ners, and to one another, to keep themselves upon their feet. The 
violent rushes abate not, but increase in frequency and fury until 
at midnight, when the streets are empty, the storm goes thunder- 
ing along them, rattling at all the latches, and tearing at all the 
shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it, rather 
than have the roofs brought down upon their brains. 

Still, the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the 
red light. 

All through the night the wind blows, and abates not. But early 
in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to 
dim the stars, it begins to lull. From that time, with occasional 
wild charges, like a wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks ; 
and at full daylight it is dead. 

It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn 
off ; that lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and ' 
blown into the Close ; and that some stones have been displaced 
upon the summit of the great tower. Christmas morning though 
it be, it is necessary to send up workmen, to ascertain the extent 
of the damage done. These, led by Durdles, go aloft ; while Mr. 
Tope and a crowd of early idlers gather down in Minor Canon Cor- 
ner, shading their eyes and watching for their appearance up there. 

This cluster is suddenly broken and put aside by the hands of 
Mr. Jasper ; all the gazing eyes are brought down to the earth by 
his loudly inquiring of Mr. Crisparkle, at an open window : 

“ Where is my nephew ? ” 

“ He has not been here. Is he not with you ? ” 

“No. He went down to the river last night, with Mr. Neville, 
to look at the storm, and has not been back. Call Mr. Neville ! ” 

“ He left this morning, early.” 

“ Left this morning early ? Let me in ! let me in ! ” 

There is no more looking up at the Tower, now. All the assem- 
bled eyes are turned on Mr. Jasper, white, half-dressed, panting, 
and clinging to the rail before the Minor Canon’s house. 


CHAPTER XV. 

IMPEACHED. 

Neville Landless had started so early and walked at so^ood 
a pace, that when the church-bells began to ring in Cloisterham 
for morning service, he was eight miles away. As he wanted his 
breakfast by that time, having set forth on a crust of bread, he 
stopped at the next roadside tavern to refresh. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


475 


Visitors in want of breakfast — unless they were horses or cattle, 
for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way 
of water-trough and hay — were so unusual at the sign of The Tilted 
Waggon, that it took a long time to get the waggon into the track 
of tea and toast and bacon. Neville in the interval, sitting in a 
sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone, the 
sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm. 

Indeed, The Tilted Waggon, as a cool establishment on the top of 
a hill, where the ground before the door was puddled with damp 
hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a 
moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting), in the bar ; 
where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf, in company with 
a mouldy tablecloth and a green-handled knife, in a sort of cast-iron 
canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb over its 
shipwreck in another canoe ; where the family linen, half washed 
and half dried, led a public life of lying about ; where everything 
to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was sugges- 
tive of a rhyme to mugs; The Tilted Waggon, all these things 
considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good enter- 
tainment for Man and Beast. However, Man, in the present case, 
was not critical, but took what entertainment he could get, and 
went on again after a longer rest than he needed. 

He stopped at some quarter of a mile from the house, hesitating 
whether to pursue the road, or to follow a cart track between two 
high hedgerows, which led across the slope of a breezy heath, and 
evidently struck into the road again by-and-bye. He decided in 
favour of this latter track, and pursued it with some toil ; the rise 
being steep, and the way worn into deep ruts. 

He was labouring along, when he became aware of some other 
pedestrians behind him. As they were coming up at a faster pace 
than his, he stood aside, against one of the high banks, to let them 
pass. But their manner was very curious. Only four of them 
passed. Other four slackened speed, and loitered as intending to 
follow him when he should go on. The remainder of the party 
(half-a-dozen perhaps) turned, and went back at a great rate. 

He looked at the four behind him, and he looked at the four be- 
fore him. They all returned his look. He resumed his way. 
The four in advance went on, constantly looking back ; the four in 
the rear came closing up. 

When they all ranged out from the narrow track upon the^ open 
slope of the heath, and this order was maintained, let him diverge 
as he would to either side, there was no longer room to doubt that 
he was beset by these fellows. He stopped, as a last test ; and 
they all stopped. 


476 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“Why do you attend upon me in this way?” he asked the 
whole body. “ Are you a pack of thieves ? ” 

“Don’t answer him,” said one of the number; he did not see 
which. “ Better be quiet.” 

“ Better be quiet ? ” repeated Neville. “ Who said so ? ” 

, Nobody replied. 

“It’s good advice, whichever of you skulkers gave it,” he went 
on angrily. “ I will not submit to be penned in between four men 
there, and four men there. I wish to pass, and I mean to pass, 
those four in front.” 

They were all standing still; himself included. 

“If eight men, or four men, or two men, set upon one,” he pro- 
ceeded, growing more enraged, “the one has no chance but to set 
his mark upon some of them. And, by the Lord, I’ll do it, if I 1 
am interrupted any farther ! ” 

Shouldering his heavy stick, and quickening his pace, he shot ; 
on to pass the four ahead. The largest and strongest man of the I 
number changed swiftly to the side on which he came up, and i 
dexterously closed with him and went down with him ; but not ] 
before the heavy stick had descended smartly. 

“Let him be!” said this man in a suppressed voice, as they 
struggled together on the grass. “ Fair play I His is the build of 
a girl to mine, and he’s got a weight strapped to his back besides. I 
Let him alone. I’ll manage him.” 

After a little rolling about, in a close scuffle which caused the 
faces of both to be besmeared with blood, the man took his knee i 
from Neville’s chest, and rose, saying : “ There I Now take him 
arm-in-arm, any two of you ! ” 

. It was immediately done. 

“As to our being a pack of thieves, Mr. Landless,” said the 
man, as he spat out some blood, and wiped more from his face ; 

“ you know better than that at midday. We wouldn’t have 
touched you if you hadn’t forced us. We’re going to take you! 
round to the high road, anyhow, and you’ll find help enough 
against thieves there, if you want it. — Wipe his face somebody ; 
see how it’s a trickling down him 1 ” 

When his face was cleansed, Neville recognised in the speaker, . 
Joe, driver of the Cloisterham omnibus, whom he had seen but 
once, and that on the day of his arrival. ' 

“ And what I recommend you for the present, is, don’t talk, Mr. 
Landless. You’ll find a friend waiting for you, at the high road 
— gone ahead by the other way when we split into two parties — 
and you had much better say nothing till you come up with him. 
Bring that stick along, somebody else, and let’s be moving I ” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


477 


Utterly bewildered, Neville stared around him and said not a 
word. Walking between his two conductors, who held his arms in 
theirs, he went on, as in a dream, until they came again into the 
high road, and into the midst of a little group of people. The men 
who had turned back were among the group ; and its central fig- 
ures were Mr. Jasper and Mr. Crisparkle. Neville’s conductors 
took him up to the Minor Canon, and there released him, as an act 
of deference to that gentleman. 

“What is all this, sir? W'hat is the matter? I feel as if I had 
lost my senses ! ” cried Neville, the group closing in around him. 

“ Where is my nephew ? ” asked Mr. Jasper, wildly. 

“Where is your nephew ?” repeated Neville. “Why do you 
ask me ? ” 

“I ask you,” retorted Jasper, “because you were the last per- 
son in his company, and he is not to be found.” 

“Not to be found ! ” cried Neville, aghast. 

“Stay, stay,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “Permit me, Jasper. Mr. 
Neville, you are confounded ; collect your thoughts ; it is of great 
importance that you should collect your thoughts; attend to me.” 

“ I will try, sir, but I seem mad.” 

“You left Mr. Jasper last night with Edwin Drood?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ At what hour ? ” 

“Was it at twelve o’clock?” asked Neville, with his hand to 
his confused head, and appealing to Jasper. 

“Quite right,” said Mr. Crisparkle ; “the hour Mr. Jasper has 
already named to me. You went down to the river together?” 

“ Undoubtedly. To see the action of the wind there.” 

“ What followed ? How long did you stay there ? ” 

“ About ten minutes ; I should say not more. We then walked 
together to your house, and he took leave of me at the door.” 

“ Did he say that he was going down to the river again ? ” 

“No. He said that he was going straight back.” 

The bystanders looked at one another, and at Mr. Crisparkle. 
To whom Mr. Jasper, who had been intensely watching Neville, 
said, in a low, distinct, suspicious voice : “ What are those stains 
upon his dress ? ” 

All eyes were turned towards the blood upon his clothes. 

“And here are the same stains upon this stick!” said Jasper, 
taking it from the hand of the man who held it. “ I know the 
stick to be his, and he carried it last night. What does this 
mean?” 

“ In the name of God, say what it means, Neville 1 ” urged 
Mr. Crisparkle. 


478 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ That man and I,” said Neville, pointing out his late adversary, 
“ had a struggle for the stick just now, and you may see the same 
marks on him, sir. What was I to suppose, when I found myself 
molested by eight people ? Could I dream of the true reason when 
they would give me none at all ? ” 

They admitted that they had thought it discreet to be silent, 
and that the struggle had taken place. And yet the very men who 
had seen it looked darkly at the smears which the bright cold air 
had already dried. 

“We must return, Neville,” said Mr. Crisparkle; “of course 
you will be glad to come back to clear yourself '! ” 

“ Of course, sir.” 

“Mr. Landless will walk at my side,” the Minor Canon con- 
tinued, looking around him. “ Come, Neville ! ” 

They set forth on the walk back ; and the others, with one ex- 
ception, straggled after them at various distances. Jasper walked 
on the other side of Neville, and never quitted that position. He 
was silent, while Mr. Crisparkle more than once repeated his former 
questions, and while Neville repeated his former answers ; also, 
while they both hazarded some explanatory conjectures. He was 
obstinately silent, because Mr. Crisparkle’s manner directly appealed 
to him to take some part in the discussion, and no appeal would 
move his fixed face. When they drew near to the city, and it was 
suggested by the Minor Canon that they might do well in calling 
on the Mayor at once, he assented with a stern nod ; but he spake 
no word until they stood in Mr. Sapsea’s parlour. 

Mr. Sapsea being informed by Mr. Crisparkle of the circum- 
stances under which they desired to make a voluntary statement 
before him, Mr. Jasper broke silence by declaring that he placed 
his whole reliance, humanly speaking, on Mr. Sapsea’s penetration. 
There was no conceivable reason why his nephew should have 
suddenly absconded, unless Mr. Sapsea could suggest one, and then 
he would defer. There was no intelligible likelihood of his having 
returned to the river, and been accidentally drowned in the dark, 
unless it should appear likely to Mr. Sapsea, and then again he 
would defer. He washed his hands as clean as he eould of all 
horrible suspicions, unless it should appear to Mr. Sapsea that some 
such were inseparable from his last companion before his disappear- 
ance (not on good terms with previously) and then, once more, he 
would defer. His own state of mind, he being distracted with 
doubts, and labouring under dismal apprehensions, was not to be 
safely trusted ; but Mr. Sapsea’s was. 

Mr. Sapsea expressed his opinion that the case had a dark look ; 
in short (and here his eyes rested full on Neville’s countenance), an 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


479 


Un-English complexion. Having made this grand point, he wan- 
dered into a denser haze and maze of nonsense than even a mayor 
might have been expected to disport himself in, and came out of it 
with the brilliant discovery that to take the life of a fellow-creature 
was to take something that didn’t belong to you. He wavered 
whether or no he should at once issue his warrant for the com- 
mittal of Neville Landless to gaol, under circumstances of grave sus- 
picion ; and he might have gone so far as to do it but for the 
indignant protest of the Minor Canon : who undertook for the young 
man’s remaining in his own house, and being produced by his own 
hands, whenever demanded. Mr. Jasper then understood Mr. Sapsea 
to suggest that the river should be dragged, that its banks should 
be rigidly examined, that particulars of the disappearance should be 
sent to all outlying places and to London, and that placards and 
advertisements should be widely circulated imploring Edwin Drood, 
if for any unknown reason he had withdrawn himself from his 
uncle’s home and society, to take pity on that loving kinsman’s 
sore bereavement and distress, and somehow inform him that he 
was yet alive. Mr. Sapsea was perfectly understood, for this was 
exactly his meaning (though he had said nothing about it) ; and 
measures were taken towards all these ends immediately. 

It .would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed 
with horror and amazement : Neville Landless, or John Jasper. 
But that Jasper’s position forced him to be active, while Neville’s 
forced him to be passive, there would have been nothing to choose 
between them. Each was bowed down and broken. 

With the earliest light of the next morning, men were at work 
upon the river, and other men — most of whom volunteered for 
the service — were examining the banks. All the livelong day the 
search went on ; upon the river, with barge and pole, and drag and 
net ; upon the muddy and rushy shore, with jack-boots, hatchet, 
spade, rope, dogs, and all imaginable appliances. Even at night, 
the river was specked with lanterns, and lurid with fires ; far-off 
creeks, into which the tide washed as it changed, had their knots 
of watchers, listening to the lapping of the stream, and looking 
out for any burden it might bear ; remote shingly causeways near 
the sea, and lonely points off which there was a race of water, 
had their unwonted flaring cressets and rough-coated figures when 
the next day dawned ; but no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the 
light of the sun. 

All that day, again, the search went on. Now, in barge and 
boat ; and now ashore among the osiers, or tramping amidst mud 
and stakes and jagged stones in low-lying places, where solitary 
watermarks and signals of strange shapes showed like spectres. 


480 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


John Jasper worked and toiled. But to no purpose ; for still no 
trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun. 

Setting his watches for that night again, so that vigilant eyes 
should be kept on every change of tide, he went home exhausted. 
Unkempt and disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon 
him, and with much of his clothing torn to rags, he had but just, 
dropped into his easy chair, when Mr. Grewgious stood before him. 

“ This is strange news,” said Mr. Grewgious. 

“ Strange and fearful news.” 

Jasper had merely lifted up his heavy eyes to say it, and now 
dropped them again as he drooped, worn out, over one side of his 
easy-chair. 

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his head and face, and stood looking 
at the fire. 

“ How is your ward ? ” asked Jasper, after a time, in a faint, 
fatigued voice. 

“ Poor little thing ! You may imagine her condition.” 

“ Have you seen his sister ? ” inquired Jasper, as before. 

“Whose?” 

The curtness of the counter-question, and the cool slow manner 
in which, as he put it, Mr. Grewgious moved his eyes from the fire 
to his companion’s face, might at any other time have been exasper- 
ating. In his depression and exhaustion, Jasper merely opened his 
eyes to say : “ The suspected young man’s.” 

“ Do you suspect him ? ” asked Mr. Grewgious. 

“ I don’t know what to think. I cannot make up my 
mind.” 

“Nor I,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ But as you spoke of him as 
the suspected young man, I thought you had made up your mind. 
— I have just left Miss Landless.” 

“ What is her state ? ” 

“Defiance of all suspicion, and unbounded faith in her brother.” 

“ Poor thing ! ” 

“However,” pursued Mr. Grewgious, “it is not of her that I 
came to speak. It is of my ward. I have a communication to 
make that will surprise you. At least, it has surprised me.” 

Jasper, with a groaning sigh, turned wearily in his chair. 

“Shall I put it off till to-morrow?” said Mr. Grewgious. 
“ Mind, I warn you, that I think it will surprise you ! ” 

More attention and concentration came into John Jasper’s eyes 
as they caught sight of Mr. Grewgious smoothing his head again, 
and again looking at the fire; but now, with a compressed and 
determined mouth. 

“ What is it ? ” demanded Jasper, becoming upright in his chair. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


481 


“To be sure,” said Mr. Grewgious, provokingly slowly and 
internally, as he kept his eyes on the fire : “ I might have known 
it sooner ; she gave me the opening ; but I am such an exceed- 
ingly Angular man, that it never occurred to me ; I took all for 
granted.” 

“ What is it 1 ” demanded Jasper once more. 

Mr. Grewgious, alternately opening and shutting the palms of 
his hands as he warmed them at the fire, and looking fixedly at 
him sideways, and never changing either his action or his look in 
all that followed, went on to reply. 

“This young couple, the lost youth and Miss Rosa, my ward, 
though so long betrothed, and so long recognising their betrothal, 
and so near being married — ” 

Mr. Grewgious saw a staring white face, and two quivering 
white lips, in the easy chair, and saw two muddy hands gripping 
its sides. But for the hands, he might have thought he had never 
seen the face. 

“ — This young couple came gradually to the discovery (made 
on both sides pretty equally, I think), that they would be happier 
and better, both in their present and their future lives, as affec- 
tionate friends, or say rather as brother and sister, than as husband 
and wife.” 

Mr. Grewgious saw a lead-coloured face in the easy chair, and on 
its surface dreadful starting drops or bubbles, as if of steel. 

“ This young couple formed at length the healthy resolution of 
interchanging their discoveries, openly, sensibly, and tenderly. 
They met for that purpose. After some innocent and generous 
talk, they agreed to dissolve their existing, and their intended, 
relations, for ever and ever.” 

Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise, open-mouthed, from 
the easy chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its head. 

“ One of this young couple, and that one your nephew, fearful, 
however, that in the tenderness of your affection for him you would 
be bitterly disappointed by so wide a departure from his projected 
life, forbore to tell you the secret, for a few days, and left it to 
be disclosed by me, when I should come down to speak to you, and 
he would be gone. I speak to you, and he is gone.” 

Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure throw back its head, 
clutch its hair with its hands, and turn with a writhing action 
from him. 

“ I have now said all I have to say : except that this young 
couple parted, firmly, though not without tears and sorrow, on 
the evening when you last saw them together.” 

Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly 

2i 


482 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and 
miry clothes upon the floor. 

Not changing his action even then, he opened and shut the 
palms of his hands as he warmed them, and looked down at it. 


‘ CHAPTER XVI. 

DEVOTED. 

When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found 
himself being tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had 
summoned for the purpose. His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat 
stiffly in a chair, with his hands upon his knees, watching his 
recovery. 

“There! You’ve come to nicely now, sir,” said the tearful 
Mrs. Tope; “you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!” 

“ A man,” said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating 
a lesson, “cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly 
tormented, and his body overtaxed by fatigue, without being 
thoroughly worn out.” 

“I fear I have alarmed you?” Jasper apologised faintly, when 
he was helped into his easy chair. 

“ Not at all, I thank you,” answered Mr. Grewgious. 

“You are too considerate.” 

“Not at all, I thank you,” answered Grewgious again. 

“You must take some wine, sir,” said Mrs. Tope, “and the 
jelly that I had ready for you, and that you wouldn’t put your lips 
to at noon, though I warned you what would come of it, you 
know, and you not breakfasted ; and you must have a wdng of the 
roast fowl that has been put back twenty times if it’s been put 
back once. It shall all be on table in five minutes, and this good 
gentleman belike will stop and see you take it.” 

This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean 
yes, or no, or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would 
have found highly mystifying, but that her attention -was divided 
by the service of the table. 

“You will take something with me?” said Jasper, as the cloth 
was laid. 

“I couldn’t get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,” 
answered Mr. Grewgious. 

Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with 
the hurry in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to 
the taste of what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to 



MR. GREWGIOUS HAS HIS SUSPICIONS. 









484 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


fortify himself against any other failure of the spirits, far more 
than to gratify his palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat 
upright, with no expression in his face, and a hard kind of imper- 
turbably polite protest all over him : as though he would have 
said, in reply to some invitation to discourse : “ I couldn’t originate 
the faintest approach to an observation on any subject whatever, 
I thank you.” 

“Do you know,” said Jasper, when he had pushed away his 
plate and glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes : “do you 
know that I find some crumbs of comfort in the communication 
with which you have so much amazed me ? ” 

“i>o you?” returned Mr. Grewgious; pretty plainly adding the 
unspoken clause : “ I don’t, I thank you ! ” 

“ After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear 
boy, so entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I 
had built for him ; and after having had time to think of it ; 
yes.” 

“ I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,” said Mr. Grewgious, 
dryly. 

“ Is there not, or is there — if I deceive myself, tell me so, and 
shorten my pain — is there not, or is there, hope that, finding him- 
self in this new position, and becoming sensitively alive to the 
awkward burden of explanation, in this quarter, and ‘that, and the 
other, with which it would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, 
and took to flight ? ” 

“ Such a thing might be,” said Mr. Grewgious, pondering. 

“ Such a thing has been. I have read of cases in which people, 
rather than face a seven days’ wonder, and have to account for 
themselves to the idle and impertinent, have taken themselves 
away, and been long unheard of.” 

“I believe such things have happened,” said Mr. Grewgious, 
pondering still. 

“When I had, and could have, no suspicion,” pursued Jasper, 
eagerly following the new track, “ that the dear lost boy had with- 
held anything from me — most of all, such a leading matter as this 
— what gleam of light was there for me in the whole black sky ? 
When I supposed that his intended wife was here, and his marriage 
close at hand, how could I entertain the possibility of his volun- 
tarily leaving this place, in a manner that would be so unaccount- 
able, capricious, and cruel ? But now that I know what you have 
told me, is there no little chink through which day pierces ? 
Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is not his 
disappearance more accountable and less cruel? The fact of his 
having just parted from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


485 


his going away. It does not make his mysterious departure the 
less cruel to me, it is true ; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.” 

Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this. 

“And even as to me,” continued Jasper, still pursuing the new 
track, with ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope : “ he 
knew that you were coming to me ; he knew that you were 
intrusted to tell me what you liave told me ; if your doing so has 
awakened a new train of thought in my perplexed mind, it reason- 
ably follows that, from the same premises, he might have foreseen 
the inferences that I should draw. Grant that he did foresee them ; 
and even the cruelty to me — and who am I! — John Jasper, 
Music Master, vanishes ! ” — 

Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this. 

“ I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have been,” 
said Jasper; “but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at first 
— showing me that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing 
reservation from me, who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within 
me. You do not extinguish it when I state it, but admit it to 
be a reasonable hope. I begin to believe it possible : ” here he 
clasped his hands : “ that he may have disappeared from among 
us of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive and well.” 

Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment. To whom Mr. Jasper 
repeated : 

“ I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of 
his own accord, and may yet be alive and well.” 

Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: “Why so?” Mr. 
Jasper repeated the arguments he had just set forth. If they had 
been less plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon’s mind 
would have been in a state of preparation to receive them, as excul- 
patory of his unfortunate pupil. But he, too, did really attach 
great importance to the lost young man’s having been, so imme- 
diately before his disappearance, placed in a new and embarrassing 
relation towards every one acquainted with his projects and affairs ; 
and the fact seemed to him to present the question in a new light. 

“I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,” said Jasper : 
as he really had done : “ that there was no quarrel or difference 
between the two young men at their last meeting. We all know 
that their first meeting was unfortunately very far from amicable ; 
but all went smoothly and quietly when they were last together at 
my house. My dear boy was not in his usual spirits; he was 
depressed — I noticed that — and I am bound henceforth to dwell 
upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there was a 
special reason for his being depressed : a reason, moreover, which 
may possibly have induced him to absent himself.” 


486 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ I pray to Heaven it may turn out so ! ” exclaimed Mr. 
Crisparkle. 

“ I pray to Heaven it may turn out so ! ” repeated Jasper. 
“You know — and Mr. Grewgious should noAV know likewise — 
that I took a great prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless, 
arising out of his furious conduct on that first occasion. You 
know' that I came to you, extremely apprehensive, on my dear 
boy’s behalf, of his mad violence. You know that I even entered 
in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark fore- 
bodings against him. Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the 
whole case. He shall not, through any suppression of mine, be 
informed of a part of it, and kept in ignorance of another part of 
it. I wish him to be good enough to understand that the com- 
munication he has made to me has hopefully infiuenced my mind, 
in spite of its having been, before this mysterious occurrence took 
place, profoundly impressed against young Landless.” 

This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much. He felt that he 
was not as open in his own dealing. He charged against himself 
reproachfully that he had suppressed, so far, the twm points of a 
second strong outbreak of temper against Edwin Drood on the part 
of Neville, and of the passion of jealousy having, to his own certain 
knowledge, fiamed up in Neville’s breast against him. He was 
convinced of Neville’s innocence of any part in the ugly disappear- 
ance; and yet so many little circumstances combined so wofully 
against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their cumulative 
weight. He was among the truest of men; but he had been 
balancing in his mind, much to its distress, wdiether his volun- 
teering to tell these two fragments of truth, at this time, would 
not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood in the place 
of truth. 

However, here was a model before him. He hesitated no longer. 
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the 
revelation he had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly 
Angular Mr. Grewgious became when he found himself in that 
unexpected position), Mr. Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr. 
Jasper’s strict sense of justice, and, expressing his absolute confi- 
dence in the complete clearance of his pupil from the least taint of 
suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his confidence in that young 
gentleman had been formed, in spite of his confidential knowledge 
that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest, and that it was 
directly incensed against Mr. Jasper’s nephew, by the circumstance 
of his romantically supposing himself to be enamoured of the same 
young lady. The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr. Jasper was 
proof even against this unlooked-for declaration. It turned him 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


487 


paler; but he repeated that he would cling to the hope he had 
derived from Mr. Grewgious ; and that if no trace of his dear boy 
were found, leading, to the dreadful inference that he had been 
made away with, he would cherish unto the last stretch of possi- 
bility the idea, that he might have absconded of his own wild will. 

Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this con- 
ference still very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on 
behalf of the young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in 
his own house, took a memorable night walk. 

He walked to Cloisterham Weir. 

He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable 
in his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his 
mind so hindered him from planning any walk, or taking any heed 
of the objects he passed, that his first consciousness of being near 
the Weir, was derived from the sound of the falling water close at 
hand. 

“ How did I come here ! ” was his first thought, as he stopped. 

“ Why did I come here ! ” was his second. 

Then, he stood intently listening to the water. A familiar 
passage in his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men’s 
names, rose so unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with 
his hand, as if it were tangible. 

It was starlight. The Weir was full two miles above the spot 
to which the young men had repaired to watch the storm. No 
search had been made up here, for the tide had been running 
strongly down, at that time of the night of Christmas Eve, and the 
likeliest places for the discovery of a body, if a fatal accident had 
happened under such circumstances, all lay — both when the tide 
ebbed, and when it flowed again — between that spot and the sea. 
The water came over the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold 
starlight night, and little could be seen of it ; yet Mr. Crisparkle 
had a strange idea that something unusual hung about the place. 

He reasoned with himself : What was it ? Where was it ? Put 
it to the proof. Which sense did it address ? 

No sense reported anything unusual there. He listened again, 
and his sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the 
Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night. 

Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was 
occupied, might of itself give the place this haunted air, he strained 
those hawk’s eyes of his for the correction of his sight. He got 
closer to the W^eir, and peered at its well-known posts and timbers. 
Nothing in the least unusual was remotely shadowed forth. But 
he resolved that he would come back early in the morning. 

The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was - 


488 


THE MYSTERY OE EDWIN DROOD. 


back again at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning. The 
whole composition before him, when he stood where he had stood 
last night, was clearly discernible in its minutest details. He had 
surveyed it closely for some minutes, and was about to withdraw 
his eyes, when they were attracted keenly to one spot. 

He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the 
sky, and at the earth, and then looked again at that one spot. It 
caught his sight again immediately, and he concentrated his vision 
upon it. He could not lose it now, though it was but such a 
speck in the landscape. It fascinated his sight. His hands be- 
gan plucking off his coat. For it struck him that at that spot — 
a corner of the Weir — something glistened, which did not move 
and come over with the glistening water-drops, but remained sta- 
tionary. 

He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged 
into the icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the timbers, 
he took from them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a 
gold watch, bearing engraved upon its back E. D. 

He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again, 
climbed it, and dived off. He knew every hole and corner of all 
the depths, and dived and dived and dived, until he could bear the 
cold no more. His notion was, that he would find the body ; he 
only found a shirt-pin sticking in some mud and ooze. 

With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking 
Neville Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor. Mr. Jas- 
per was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville 
was detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report 
rose against him. He was of that vindictive and violent nature, 
that but for his poor sister, who alone had influence over him, 
and out of whose sight he was never to be trusted, he would be in 
the daily commission of murder. Before coming to England he 
had caused to be whipped to death sundry “ Natives ” — nomadic 
persons, encamping now in Asia, novv^ in Africa, now in the West 
Indies, and now at the North Pole — vaguely supposed in Clois- 
terham to be always black, always of great virtue, always calling 
themselves Me, and everybody else Massa or Missie (according to 
sex), and always reading tracts of the obscurest meaning, in 
broken English, but always accurately understanding them in the 
purest mother tongue. He had nearly brought Mrs. Crisparkle’s 
grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. (Those original expressions 
were Mr. Sapsea’s.) He had repeatedly said he would have Mr. 
Crisparkle’s life. He had repeatedly said he would have every- 
body’s life, and become in effect the last man. He had been 
brought down to Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent Phi- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


lanthropist, and why ? Because that Philanthropist had expressly 
declared : “I owe it to my fellow-creatures that he should be, in 
the words of Bentham, where he is the cause of the greatest dan- 
ger to the smallest number.*’ 

These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheaded- 
ness might not have hit him in a vital place. But he had to 
stand against a trained and well-directed fire of arms of precision 
too. He had notoriously threatened the lost young man, and had, 
according to the showing of his own faithful friend and tutor who 
strove so hard for him, a cause of bitter animosity (created by 
himself, and stated by himself), against that ill-starred fellow. 
He had armed himself with an offensive weapon for the fatal 
night, and he had gone off early in the morning, after making prep- 
arations for departure. He had been found with traces of blood 
on him ; truly, they might have been wholly caused as he repre- 
sented, but they might not, also. On a search-warrant being 
issued for the examination of his room, clothes, and so forth, it 
was discovered that he had destroyed all his papers, and re- 
arranged all his possessions, on the very afternoon of the disappear- 
ance. The watch found at the Weir was challenged by the 
jeweller as one he had wound and set for Edwin Drood, at twenty 
minutes past two on that same afternoon ; and it had run down, 
before being cast into the water ; and it was the jeweller’s positive 
opinion that it had never been rewound. This would justify the 
hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not long after he 
left Mr. Jasper’s house at midnight, in company with the last 
person seen with him, and that it had been thrown away after 
being retained some hours. Why thrown away ? If he had been 
murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or concealed, or both, as that 
the murderer hoped identification to be impossible, except from 
something that he wore, assuredly the murderer would seek to 
remove from the body the most lasting, the best known, and the 
most easily recognisable, things upon it. Those things would be 
the watch and shirt-pin. As to his opportunities of casting them 
into the river ; if he were the object of these suspicions, they were 
easy. For, he had been seen by many persons, wandering about 
on that side of the city — indeed on all sides of it — in a miser- 
able and seemingly half-distracted manner. As to the choice of 
the spot, obviously such criminating evidence had better take its 
chance of being found anywhere, rather than upon himself, or in 
his possession. Concerning the reconciliatory nature of the ap- 
pointed meeting between the two young men, very little could be 
made of that in young Landless’s favour ; for it distinctly appeared 
that the meeting originated, not with him, but with Mr. Crisparkle, 


490 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


and that it had been urged on by Mr. Crisparkle ; and who 
could say how unwillingly, or in what ill-conditioned mood, his 
enforced pupil had gone to it? The more his case was looked 
into, the weaker it became in every point. Even the broad sug- 
gestion that the lost young man had absconded, was rendered 
additionally improbable on the showing of the young lady from 
whom he had so lately parted ; for, what did she say, with great 
earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated ? That he had, ex- 
pressly and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would 
await the arrival of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious. And yet, be it 
observed, he disappeared before that gentleman appeared. 

On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was 
detained, and redetained, and the search was pressed on every 
hand, and Jasper laboured night and day. But nothing more was 
found. No discovery being made, which proved the lost man to 
be dead, it at length became necessary to release the person sus- 
pected of having made away with him. Neville was set at large. 
Then, a consequence ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had too well 
foreseen. Neville must leave the place, for the place shunned him 
and cast him out. Even had it not been so, the dear old china 
shepherdess would have worried herself to death with fears for 
her son, and with general trepidation occasioned by their having 
such an inmate. Even had that not been so, the authority to 
which the Minor Canon deferred officially, would have settled the 
point. 

“Mr. Crisparkle,” quoth the Dean, “human justice may err, 
but it must act according to its lights. The days of taking sanct- 
uary are past. This young man must not take sanctuary with 
us.” 

“You mean that he must leave my house, sir?” 

“Mr. Crisparkle,” returned the prudent Dean, “I claim no 
authority in your house. I merely confer with you, on the pain- 
ful necessity you find yourself under, of depriving this young man 
of the great advantages of your counsel and instruction.” 

“ It is very lamentable, sir,” Mr. Crisparkle represented. 

“Very much so,” the Dean assented. 

“And if it be a necessity — ” Mr. Crisparkle faltered. 

“ As you unfortunately find it to be,” returned the Dean. 

Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively : “ It is hard to prejudge 
his case, sir, but I am sensible that — ” 

“Just so. Perfectly. As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,” interposed 
the Dean, nodding his head smoothly, “ there is nothing else to 
be done. No doubt, no doubt. There is no alternative, as your 
good sense has discovered.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


491 


“ I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir, neverthe- 
less.” 

“ We-e-ell ! ” said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and 
slightly glancing around him, “I would not say so, generally. 
Not generally. Enough of suspicion attaches to him to — no, I 
think I would not say so, generally.” 

Mr. Orisparkle bowed again. 

“ It does not become us, perhaps,” pursued the Dean, “to be par- 
tisans. Not partisans. We clergy keep our hearts warm and our 
heads cool, and we hold a judicious middle course.” 

“ I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public, 
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspi- 
cion may be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light 
in this extraordinary matter ? ” 

“Not at all,” returned the Dean. “And yet, do you know, I 
don’t think,” with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two 
words : “I don’t think I would state it, emphatically. State it? 
Ye-e-es ! But emphatically ? No-o-o. I not. In point of 
fact, Mr. Orisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, 
we clergy need do nothing emphatically.” 

So Minor Canon Row knew- Neville Landless no more ; and he 
went whithersoever he would, or coiild, with a blight upon his 
name and fame. 

It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his 
place in the choir. Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had 
deserted him, his sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst mis- 
givings had come back. A day or two afterwards, while unrobing, 
he took his Diary from a pocket of his coat, turned the leaves, and 
with an impressive look, and without one spoken word, handed 
this entiy to Mr. Orisparkle to read : 

“ My dear boy is murdered. The discovery of the watch and 
shirt-pin convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that 
his jewellery was taken from him to prevent identification by its 
means. All the delusive hopes I had founded on his separation 
from his betrothed wife, I give to the winds. They perish before 
this fatal discovery. I now swear, and record the oath on this 
page. That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human 
creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never will 
relax in my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime 
of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And, 
That I devote myself to his destruction.” 


492 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


CHAPTER XVII. 

PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL. 

Full half a year had come and gone, and Mr. Crisparkle sat in a 
waiting-room in the London chief offices of the Haven of Philan- 
thropy, until he could have audience of Mr. Honeythunder. 

In his college days of athletic exercises, Mr. Crisparkle had known 
professors of the Noble Art of fisticuffs, and had attended two or three 
of their gloved gatherings. He had now an opportunity of observing 
that as to the phrenological formation of the backs of their heads, 
the Professing Philanthropists were uncommonly like the Pugilists. 
In the development of all those organs which constitute, or attend, 
a propensity to “pitch into” your fellow-creatures, the Philan- 
thropists were remarkably favoured. There were several Profess- 
ors passing in and out, with exactly the aggressive air upon them 
of being ready for a turn-up with any Novice who might happen to 
be on hand, that Mr. Crisparkle well remembered in the circles of 
the Fancy. Preparations were in progress for a moral little Mill 
somewhere on the rural circuit, and other Professors were backing 
this or that Heavy-'Weight as good for such or such speech-making 
hits, so very much after the manner of the sporting publicans, that 
the intended Resolutions might have been Rounds. In an official 
manager of these displays much celebrated for his platform tactics, 
Mr. Crisparkle recognised (in a suit of black) the counterpart of a 
deceased benefactor of his species, an eminent public character, once 
known to fame as Frosty-faced Fogo, who in days of yore superin- 
tended the formation of the magic circle with the ropes and stakes. 
There were only three conditions of resemblance wanting between 
these Professors and those. Firstly, the Philanthropists were in 
very bad training : much too fleshy, and presenting, both in face 
and figure, a superabundance of what is known to Pugilistic Ex- 
perts as Suet Pudding. Secondly, the Philanthropists had not the 
good temper of the Pugilists, and used worse language. Thirdly, 
their fighting code stood in great need of revision, as empowering 
them not only to bore their man to the ropes, but to bore him to 
the confines of distraction ; also to hit him when he was down, hit 
him anywhere and anyhow, kick him, stamp upon him, gouge him, 
and maul him behind his back without mercy. In these last par- 
ticulars the Professors of the Noble Art were much nobler than 
the Professors of Philanthropy. 

Mr. Crisparkle was so completely lost in musing on these simi- 
larities and dissimilarities, at the same time watching the crowd 
which came and went by, always, as it seemed, on errands of antag- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


493 


onistically snatching something from somebody, and never giving 
anything to anybody, that his name was called before he heard it. 
On his at length responding, he was shown by a miserably shabby 
and underpaid stipendiary Philanthropist (who could hardly have 
done worse if he had taken service with a declared enemy of the 
human race) to Mr. Honeythunder’s room. 

“ Sir,” said Mr. Honey thunder, in his tremendous voice, like a 
schoolmaster issuing orders to a boy of whom he had a bad opinion, 
“ sit down.” 

Mr. Crisparkle seated himself. 

Mr. Honeythunder having signed the remaining few score of a 
few thousand circulars, calling upon a corresponding number of 
families without means to come forward, stump up instantly, and 
be Philanthropists, or go to the Devil, another shabby stipendiary 
Philanthropist (highly disinterested, if in earnest) gathered these 
into a basket and walked off with them. 

“Now, Mr. Crisparkle,” said Mr. Honeythunder, turning his 
chair half round towards him when they were alone, and squaring 
his arms with his hands on his knees, and his brows knitted, as if 
he added, I am going to make short work of you : “ Now, Mr. 
Crisparkle, we entertain different views, you and I, sir, of the sanc- 
tity of human life.” 

“Do we ? ” returned the Minor Canon. 

“We do, sir.” 

“Might I ask you,” said the Minor Canon: '“what are your 
views on that subject?” 

“ That human life is a thing to be held sacred, sir.” 

“Might I ask you,” pursued the Minor Canon as before : “what 
you suppose to be my views on that subject ? ” 

“ By George, sir ! ” returned the Philanthropist, squaring his 
arms still more, as he frowned on Mr. Crisparkle : “ they are best 
known to yourself.” 

“Readily admitted. But you began by saying that we took 
different views, you know. Therefore (or you could not say so) 
you must have set up some views as mine. Pray, what views have 
you set up as mine ? ” 

“Here is a man — and a young man,” said Mr. Honeythunder, 
as if that made the matter infinitely worse, and he could have easily 
borne the loss of an old one, “ swept off the face of the earth by a 
deed of violence. What do you call that ? ” 

“Murder,” said the Minor Canon. 

“What do you call the doer of that deed, sir?” 

“A murderer,” said the Minor Canon. 

“ I am glad to hear you admit so much, sir,” retorted Mr. Honey- 


494 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


thunder, in his most offensive manner ; “ and I candidly tell you 
that I didn’t expect it.” Here he lowered heavily at Mr. Crisparkle 
again. 

“ Be so good as to explain what you mean by those very unjus- 
tifiable expressions.” 

“ I don’t sit here, sir,” returned the Philanthropist, raising his 
voice to a roar, “to be browbeaten.” 

“ As the only other person present, no one can possibly know 
that better than I do,” returned the Minor Canon very quietly. 
“ But I interrupt your explanation.” 

“ Murder ! ” proceeded Mr. Honey thunder, in a kind of boister- 
ous reverie, with his platform folding of his arms, and his platform 
nod of abhorrent reflection after each short sentiment of a word. 
“ Bloodshed ! Abel ! Cain ! I hold no terms with Cain. I repu- 
diate with a shudder the red hand when it is offered me.” 

Instead of instantly leaping into his chair and cheering himself 
hoarse, as the Brotherhood in public meeting assembled would 
infallibly have done on this- cue, Mr. Crisparkle merely reversed 
the quiet crossing of his legs, and said mildly : “ Don’t let me 
interrupt your explanation — when you begin it.” 

“ The Commandments say, no murder. NO murder, sir ! ” pro- 
ceeded Mr. Honeythunder, platformally pausing as if he took Mr. 
Crisparkle to task for having distinctly asserted that they said : 
You may do a little murder, and then leave off. 

“ And they also say, you shall bear no false witness,” observed 
Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ Enough ! ” bellowed Mr. Honeythunder, with a solemnity and 
severity that would have brought the house down at a meeting, 
“ E — e — nough ! My late wards being now of age, and I being 
released from a trust which I cannot contemplate without a thrill 
of horror, there are the accounts which you have undertaken to ac- 
cept on their behalf, and there is a statement of the balance which 
you have undertaken to receive, and which you cannot receive too 
soon. And let me tell you, sir, I wish that, as a man and a Minor 
Canon, you were better employed,” with a nod. “ Better employed,” 
with another nod. “ Bet — ter em — ployed ! ” with another and the 
three nods added up. 

Mr. Crisparkle rose ; a little heated in the face, but with perfect 
command of himself. 

“ Mr. Honeythunder,” he said, taking up the papers referred to : 
“ my being better or worse employed than I am at present is a 
matter of taste and opinion. You might think me better employed 
in enrolling myself a member of your Society.” 

“ Ay, indeed, sir ! ” retorted Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


495 


iu a threatening manner. “ It would have been better for you if 
you had done that long ago ! ” 

“ I think otherwise.” 

“ Or,” said Mr. Honey thunder, shaking his head again, “ I might 
think one of your profession better employed in devoting himself 
to the discovery and punishment of guilt than in leaving that duty 
to be undertaken by a layman.” 

“ I may regard my profession from a point of view which teaches 
me that its first duty is towards those who are in necessity and 
tribulation, who are desolate and oppressed,” said Mr. Crisparkle. 
“However, as I have quite clearly satisfied myself that it is no 
part of my profession to make professions, I say no more of that. 
But I owe it to Mr. Neville, and to Mr. Neville’s sister (and in a 
much lower degree to myself), to say to you that I Tcnow I was in 
the full possession and understanding of Mr. Neville’s mind and 
heart at the time of this occurrence ; and that, without in the least 
colouring or concealing what was to be deplored in him and re- 
quired to be corrected, I feel certain that his tale is true. Feeling 
that certainty, I befriend him. As long as that certainty shall last, 
I will befriend him. And if any consideration could shake me in 
this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, 
that no man’s good opinion — no, nor no woman’s — so gained, could 
compensate me for the loss of my own.” 

Good fellow ! manly fellow ! And he was so modest, too. 
There was no more self-assertion in the Minor Canon than in the 
schooll^oy who had stood in the breezy playing-fields keeping a 
wicket. He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the 
large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every 
true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing 
little to the really great in spirit. 

“ Then who do you make out did the deed?” asked Mr. Honey- 
thunder, turning on him abruptly. 

“Heaven forbid,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that in my desire to 
clear one man I should lightly criminate another ! I accuse no 
one.” 

“ Tcha ! ” ejaculated Mr. Honey thunder with great disgust ; for 
this was by no means the principle on which the Philanthropic 
Brotherhood usually proceeded. “And, sir, you are not a disinter- 
ested witness, we must bear in mind.” 

“ How am I an interested one ? ” inquired Mr. Crisparkle, smil- 
ing innocently, at a loss to imagine. 

“ There was a certain stipend, sir, paid to you for your pupil, 
which may have warped your judgment a bit,” said Mr. Honey- 
thunder, coarsely. 


496 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Perhaps I expect to retain it still ? ” Mr. Crisparkle returned, 
enlightened ; “ do you mean that .too ? ” 

“Well, sir,” returned the professional Philanthropist, getting up 
and thrusting his hands down into his trousers-pockets, “I don’t 
go about measuring people for caps. If people find I have any 
about me that fit ’em, they can put ’em on and wear ’em if they 
like. That’s their look out : not mine.” 

Mr. Crisparkle eyed him with a just indignation, and took him 
to task thus : 

“ Mr. Honey thunder, I hoped when I came in here that I might 
be under no necessity of commenting on the introduction of plat- 
form manners or platform manoeuvres among the decOnt forbear- 
ances of private life. But you have given me such a specimen of 
both, that I should be a fit subject for both if I remained silent 
respecting them. They are detestable.” 

“ They don’t suit you^ I dare say, sir.” 

“ They are,” repeated Mr. Crisparkle, without noticing the inter- 
ruption, “detestable. They violate equally the justice that should 
belong to Christians, and the restraints that should belong to gentle- 
men. You assume a great crime to have been committed by one 
whom I, acquainted with the attendant circumstances, and having 
numerous reasons on my side, devoutly believe to be innocent of 
it. Because I differ from you on that vital point, what is your 
platform resource ? Instantly to turn upon me, charging that I 
have no sense of the enormity of the crime itself, but am its aider 
and abettor ! So, another time — taking me as representing your 
opponent in other cases — you set up a platform credulity ; a 
'moved and seconded and carried-unanimously profession of faith 
in some ridiculous delusion or mischievous imposition. I decline to 
believe it, and you fall. back upon your platform resource of pro- 
claiming that I believe nothing ; that because I will not bow down 
to a false God of your making, I deny the true God ! Another 
time you make the platform discovery that War is a calamity, 
and you propose to abolish it by a string of twisted resolutions 
tossed into the air like the tail of a kite. I do not admit the dis- 
covery to be yours in the least, and I have not a grain of faith in 
your remedy. Again, your platform resource of representing me 
as revelling in the horrors of a battle-field like a fiend incarnate ! 
Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform rushes, 
you would punish the sober for the drunken. I claim consideration 
for the comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober ; and 
you presently make platform proclamation that I have a depraved 
desire to turn Heaven’s creatures into swine and wild beasts ! In 
all such cases your movers, and your seconders, and your supporters 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


497 


— your regular Professors of all degrees, run amuck like so many 
mad Malays ; habitually attributing the lowest and basest motives 
with the utmost recklessness (let me call your attention to a recent 
instance in yourself for which you should blush), and quoting fig- 
ures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a statement 
of any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and no 
Debtor, or all Debtor side and no Creditor. Therefore it is, Mr. 
Honeythunder, that I consider the platform a sufiiciently bad ex- 
ample and a sufiiciently bad school, even in public life ; but hold 
that, carried into private life, it becomes an unendurable nuisance.” 

“ These are strong words, sir ! ” exclaimed the Philanthropist. 

“I hope so,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “ Good morning.” 

He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into 
his regular brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he 
went along, wondering what the china shepherdess would have 
said if she had seen him pounding Mr. Honeythunder in the late 
little lively affair. For Mr. Crisparkle had just enough of harm- 
less vanity to hope that he had hit hard, and to glow with the 
belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic jacket pretty hand- 
somely. 

He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr. Grew- 
gious. Full many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached 
some attic rooms in a corner, turned the latch of their unbolted 
door, and stood beside the table of Neville Landless. 

An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about 
their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their 
sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden 
bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, 
and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone 
in at the ugly garret window, which had a.penthouse to itself thrust 
out among the tiles ; and on the cracked and smoke-blackened para- 
pet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the place rheumati- 
cally hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their 
crutches in their nests ; and there was a play of living leaves at 
hand that changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music 
in it that would have been melody in the country. 

The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books. 
Everything expressed the abode of a poor student. That Mr. 
Crisparkle had been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, 
or that he combined the three characters, might have been easily 
seen in the friendly beam of his eyes upon them as he entered. 

“ How goes it, Neville ? ” 

“I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.” 

“I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so 


498 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


bright,” said the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had 
taken in his. 

“They brighten at the sight of you,” returned Neville. “If 
you were to fall away from me, they would soon be dull enough.” 

“ Rally, rally ! ” urged the other, in a stimulating tone. “ Fight 
for it, Neville ! ” 

“If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally 
me ; if my pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it 
beat again,” said Neville. “ But I have rallied, and am doing 
famously.” 

Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards 
the light. 

“I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,” he said, indicat- 
ing his own healthy cheek by way of pattern. “ I want more sun 
to shine upon you.” 

Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice : “I 
am not hardy enough for that, yet. I may become so, but I can- 
not bear it yet. If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets 
as I did ; if you had seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the 
better sort of people silently giving me too much room to pass, 
that I might not touch them or come near them, you wouldn’t 
think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go about in the day- 
light.” 

“ My poor fellow ! ” said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely 
sympathetic that the young man caught his hand, “ I never said 
it was unreasonable ; never thought so. But I should like you to 
do it.” 

“And that would give me the strongest motive to do it. But 
I cannot yet. I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the 
stream of strangers I pass in this vast city look at me without sus- 
picion. I feel marked and tainted, even when I go out — as I do 
only — at night. But the darkness covers me then, and I take 
courage from it.” 

Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking 
down at him. 

“ If I could have changed my name,” said Neville, “ I would 
have done so. But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can’t do 
that, for it would look like guilt. If I could have gone to some 
distant place, I might have found relief in that, but the thing is 
not to be thought of, for the same reason. Hiding and escaping 
would be the construction in either case. It seems a little hard 
to be so tied to a stake, and innocent ; but I don’t complain.” 

“And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,” said 
Mr. Crisparkle, compassionately. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 499 

“No, sir, I know that. The ordinary fulness of time and cir- 
cumstances is all I have to trust to.” 

“It will right you at last, Neville.” 

“ So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.” 

But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was 
falling cast a shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling 
that the broad hand upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady 
as its own natural strength had rendered it when it first touched 
him just now, he brightened and said : 

“ Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow ! and you know, 
Mr. Crisparkle, what need I have of study in all ways. Not to 
mention that you have advised me to study for the difficult profes- 
sion of the law, specially, and that of course I am guiding myself 
by the advice of such a friend and helper. Such a good friend and 
helper ! ” 

He took the fortifying hand from his shoulder, and kissed it. 
Mr. Crisparkle J)eamed at the books, but not so brightly as when 
he had entered. 

“ I gather from your silence on the subject that my late guar- 
dian is adverse, Mr. Crisparkle 1 ” 

The Minor Canon answered : “ Your late guardian is a — a most 
unreasonable person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable per- 
son whether he is ac^verse, or joerverse, or the reverse.” 

“ Well for me that I have enough with economy to live upon,” 
sighed Neville, half wearily and half cheerily, “ while I wait to be 
learned, and wait to be righted ! Else I might have proved the 
proverb, that while the grass grows, the steed starves ! ” 

He opened some books as he said it, and was soon immersed in 
their interleaved and annotated passages; while Mr. Crisparkle 
sat beside him, expounding, correcting, and advising. The Minor 
Canon’s Cathedral duties made these visits of his difficult to ac- 
complish, and only to be compassed at intervals of many weeks. 
But they were as serviceable as they were precious to Neville 
Landless. 

When they liad got through such studies as they had in hand, 
they stood leaning on the window-sill, and looking down upon the 
patch of garden. “Next week,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “you will 
cease to be alone, and will have a devoted companion.” 

“ And yet,” returned Neville, “ this seems an uncongenial place 
to bring my sister to.” 

“ I don’t think so',” said the Minor Canon. “ There is duty to 
be done here ; and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage 
wanted here.” 

“ I meant,” explained Neville, “ that the surroundings are so dull 


500 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

and unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or 
society here.” 

“You have only to remember,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that you 
are here yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.” 

They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle be- 
gan anew. 

“When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your 
sister had risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as supe- 
rior to you as the tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than 
the chimneys of Minor Canon Corner. Do you remember that ? ” 

“ Right well ! ” 

“ I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight. 
No matter what I think it now. What I would emphasise is, 
that under the head of Pride your sister is a great and opportune 
example to you.” 

“ Under all heads that are included in the composition of a fine 
character, she is.” , 

“Say so; but take this one. Your sister has learnt how to 
govern what is proud in her nature. She can dominate it even 
when it is wounded through her sympathy with you. No doubt 
she has suffered deeply in those same streets where you suffered 
deeply. No doubt her life is darkened by the cloud that darkens 
yours. But bending her pride into a grand composure that is not 
haughty or aggressive, but is a sustained confidence in you and in the 
truth, she has won her way through those streets until she passes 
along them as high in the general respect as any one who treads 
them. Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disap- 
pearance, she has faced malignity and folly — for you — as only a 
brave nature well directed can. So it will be with her to the end. 
Another and weaker kind of pride might sink broken-hearted, but 
never such a pride as hers : which knows no shrinking, and can 
get no mastery over her.” 

The pale cheek beside him flushed under the comparison, and 
the hint implied in it. 

“I will do all I can to imitate her,” said Neville. 

“ Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave 
woman,” answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly. “It is growing dark. 
Will you go my way with me, when it is quite dark ? Mind ! it 
is not I who wait for darkness.” 

Neville replied, that he would accompany him directly. But 
Mr. Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grew- 
gious as an act of courtesy, and would run across to that gentle- 
man’s chambers, and rejoin Neville on his own doorstep, if he 
would come down there to meet him. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


501 


Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the 
dusk at his open window ; his wineglass and decanter on the round 
table at his elbow ; himself and his legs on the window-seat ; only 
one hinge in his whole body, like a bootjack. 

“How do you do, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious, with 
abundant offers of hospitality, which were as cordially declined as 
made. “And how is your charge getting on over the way in the 
set that I had the pleasure of recommending to you as vacant and 
eligible ? ” 

Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably. 

“ I am glad you approve of them,” said Mr. Grewgious, “because 
I entertain a sort of fancy for having him under my eye.” 

As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up considerably before he 
could see the chambers, the phraso was to be taken figuratively 
and not literally. 

“ And how did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir ? ” said Mr. 
Grewgious. 

Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well. 

“ And where did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir ? ” 

Mr. Crisparkle had left him at Cloisterham. 

“And when did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?” 

That morning. 

“ Umps ! ” said Mr. Grewgious. “ He didn’t say he was com- 
ing, perhaps ? ” 

“ Coming where ? ” 

“ Anywhere, for instance ? ” said Mr. Grewgious. 

“No.” 

“ Because here he is,” said Mr. Grewgious, who had asked all these 
questions, with his preoccupied glance directed out at window, 
“ And he don’t look agreeable, does he ? ” 

Mr. Crisparkle was craning towards the window, when Mr. 
Grewgious added : 

“If you will kindly step round here behind me, in the gloom of 
the room, and will cast your eye at the second-floor landing window 
in yonder house, I think you will hardly fail to see a slinking indi- 
vidual in whom I recognise our local friend.” 

“You are right ! ” cried Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ Umps ! ” said Mr. Grewgious. Then he added, turning his 
face so abruptly that his head nearly came into collision with Mr. 
Crisparkle’s : “ what should you say that our local friend was up to ? ” 

The last passage he had been shown in the Diary returned on 
Mr. Crisparkle’s mind with the force of a strong recoil, and he 
asked Mr. Grewgious if he thought it possible that Neville was to 
be harassed by the keeping of a watch upon him ? 


502 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. f 

( 

“ A watch ? ” repeated Mr. G-rewgious musingly. “ Ay ! ” 

“Which would not only of itself haunt and torture his life,” said ; 
Mr. Crisparkle warmly, “ but would expose him to the torment of 
a perpetually reviving suspicion, whatever he might do, or wher- ; 
ever he might go.” ' 

“Ay!” said Mr. Grewgious, musingly still. “Do I see him , 
waiting for you ? ” 

“No doubt you do.” 

“ Then would you have the goodness to excuse my getting up to 
see you out, and to go out to join him, and to go the way that you 
were going, and to take no notice of our local friend % ” said Mr. 
Grewgious. “ I entertain a sort of fancy for having him under my j 
eye to-night, do you know % ” 

Mr. Crisparkle, with a significant nod, complied ; and rejoining -| 
Neville, went away with him. They dined together, and parted at i 
the yet unfinished and undeveloped railway station : Mr. Crisparkle i 
to get home ; Neville to walk the streets, cross the bridges, make | 
a wide round of the city in the friendly darkness, and tire himself ; 
out. 

It was midnight when he returned from his solitary expedition 
and climbed his staircase. The night was hot, and the windows of ’ 
the staircase were all wide open. Coming to the top, it gave him 
a passing chill of surprise (there being no rooms but his up there) I 
to find a stranger sitting on the window-sill, more after the man- i 
ner of a venturesome glazier then an amateur ordinarily careful of 
his neck ; in fact, so much more outside the window than inside, : 
as to suggest the thought that he must have come up by the j 
water-spout instead of the stairs. 

The stranger said nothing until Neville put his key in his door ; 
then, seeming to make sure of his identity from the action, he 
spoke : 

“ I beg your pardon,” he said, coming from the window with a ' 
frank and smiling air, and a prepossessing address ; “ the beans.” 

Neville was quite at a loss. 

“ Runners,” said the visitor. “ Scarlet. Next door at the 
back.” 

“ 0,” returned Neville. “ And the mignonette and wallflower ? ” '■ 

“The same,” said the visitor. 

“ Pray walk in.” 

“ Thank you.” 

Neville lighted his candles, and the visitor sat down. A hand- 
some gentleman, with a young face, but with an older figure in its 
robustness and its breadth of shoulder ; say a man of eight-and-^ 
twenty, or at the utmost thirty ; so extremely sunburnt that the* 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


503 


contrast between his brown visage and the white forehead shaded 
out of doors by his hat, and the glimpses of white throat below the 
neckerchief, would have been almost ludicrous but for his broad 
temples, bright blue eyes, clustering brown hair, and laughing 
teeth. 

“I have noticed,” said he ; “ — my name is Tartar.” 

Neville inclined his head. 

“ I have noticed (excuse me) that you shut yourself up a good 
deal, and that you seem to like my garden aloft here. If you 
would like a little more of it, I could throw out a few lines and 
stays between my windows and yours, which the runners would 
take to directly. And I have some boxes, both of mignonette and 
wallflower, that I could shove on along the gutter (with a boat- 
hook I have by me) to your windows, and draw back again when 
they wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again when they 
were ship-shape; so that they would cause you no trouble. I 
couldn’t take this liberty without asking your permission, so I 
venture to ask it. Tartar, corresponding set, next door.” 

“You are very kind.” 

“ Not at all. I ought to apologise for looking in so late. But 
having noticed (excuse me) that you generally walk out at night, 
I thought I should inconvenience you least by awaiting your re- 
turn. I am always afraid of inconveniencing busy men, being an 
idle man.” 

“I should not have thought so, from your appearance.” 

“No? I take it as a compliment. In fact, I was bred in the 
Royal Navy, and was First Lieutenant when I quitted it. But, an 
uncle disappointed in the service leaving me his property on con- 
dition that I left the Navy, I accepted the fortune, and resigned 
my commission.” 

“ Lately, I presume ? ” 

“ Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years of knocking about first. 
I came here some nine months before you ; I had had one crop 
before you came. I chose this place, because, having served last 
in a little corvette, I knew I should feel more at home where I 
had a constant opportunity of knocking my head against the ceil- 
ing. Besides, it would never do for a man who had been aboard 
ship from his boyhood to turn luxurious all at once. Besides, 
again ; having been accustomed to a very short allowance of land 
all my life, I thought I’d feel my way to the command of a landed 
estate, by beginning in boxes.” 

Whimsically as this was said, there was a touch of merry earnest- 
ness in it that made it doubly whimsical. 

“ However,” said the Lieutenant, “ I have talked quite enough 


504 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


I 


about myself. It is not my way, I hope ; it has merely been to 
present myself to you naturally. If you will allow me to take the 
liberty I have described, it will be a charity, for it will give me 
something more to do. And you are not to suppose that it will 
entail any interruption or intrusion on you, for that is far from my 
intention.” 

Neville replied that he was greatly obliged, and that he thank- 
fully accepted the kind proposal. 

“ I am very glad to take your windows in tow,” said the Lieu- 
tenant. “ From what I have seen of you when I have been gar- 
dening at mine, and you have been looking on, I have thought you 
(excuse me) rather too studious and delicate. May I ask, is your 
health at all affected ? ” 

“ I have undergone some mental distress,” said Neville, confused, 
“which has stood me in the stead of illness.” 

“ Pardon me,” said Mr. Tartar. 

With the greatest delicacy he shifted his ground to the windows 
again, and asked if he could look at one of them. On Neville’s 
opening it, he immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft 
with a whole watch in an emergency, and were setting a bright 
example. 

“ For Heaven’s sake,” cried Neville, “ don’t do that ! W^here 
are you going, Mr. Tartar ? You’ll be dashed to pieces ! ” 

“All well!” said the Lieutenant, coolly looking about him on 
the housetop. “ All taut and trim here. Those lines and stays 
shall be rigged before you turn out in the morning. May 'I take 
this short cut home, and say good night ? ” 

“ Mr. Tartar I ” urged Neville. “ Pray ! It makes me giddy 
to see you I ” 

But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand and the deftness of a 
cat, had already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet runners with- 
out breaking a leaf, and “gone below.” 

Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind held aside with his 
hand, happened at that moment to have Neville’s chambers under 
his eye for the last time that night. Fortunately his eye was on 
the front of the house and not the back, or this remarkable appear- 
ance and. disappearance might have broken his rest as a phenomenon. 
But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing there, not even a light in the 
windows, his gaze wandered from the wdndows to the stars, as if 
he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. 
Many of us would, if we could ; but none of us so much as know 
our letters in the stars yet — or seem likely to do it, in ‘this state 
of existence — and few languages can be read until their alphabets 
are mastered. 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


505 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM. 

At about this time a stranger appeared in Cloisterham ; a white- 
haired personage, with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up in a 
tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and grey trousers, he 
had something of a military air ; but he announced himself at the 
Crozier (the orthodox hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) 
as an idle dog who lived upon his means ; and he farther announced 
that he had a mind to take a lodging in the picturesque old city 
for a month or two, with a view of settling down there altogether. 
Both announcements were made in the coffee-room of the Crozier, 
to all whom it might or miglit not concern, by the stranger as he 
stood with his back to the empty fireplace, waiting for his fried 
sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry. And the waiter (business 
being chronically slack at the Crozier) represented all whom it 
might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of the 
information. 

This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock 
of white hair was unusually thick and ample. “ I suppose, waiter,” 
he said, shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might 
shake his before sitting down to dinner, “ that a fair lodging for a 
single buffer might be found in these parts, eh ? ” 

The waiter had no doubt of it. 

“Something old,” said the gentleman. “Take my hat down 
for a moment from that peg, will you ? No, I don’t want it ; look 
into it. What do you see written there?” 

The waiter read : “ Datchery.” 

“ Now you know my name,” said the gentleman ; “ Dick Datchery. 
Hang it up again. I was saying something old is what I should 
prefer, something odd and out of the way ; something venerable, 
architectural, and inconvenient.” 

“ We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, 
sir, I think,” replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its re- 
sources that way ; “ indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit 
you that far, however particular you might be. But a architectu- 
ral lodging ! ” That seemed to trouble the waiter’s head, and he 
shook it. 

“Anything Cathedraly, now,” Mr. Datchery suggested. 

“ Mr. Tope,” said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin 
with his hand, “ would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.” 

“ \Yho is Mr. Tope ? ” inquired Dick Datchery. 

The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. 




506 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


I 

71 

Tope had indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself — or offered ) 
to let them ; but that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s ■ 
window-bill, long a Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared ; prob- , 
ably had tumbled down one day, and never been put up again. 

“I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Datchery, “after dinner.” 

So when he had done his dinner, he was 'duly directed to the 
spot, and sallied out for it. But the Crozier being an hotel of a i 
most retiring disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally 
precise, he soon became bewildered, and went boggling about and | 
about the Cathedral Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of | 
it, with a general impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope’s was J 
somewhere very near it, and that, like the children in the game of j 
hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was warm in his search [ 
when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn’t see it. 

He was getting very cold indeed when he came upon a fragment - 
of burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing. Un- 
happy, because a hideous small boy was stoning it through the 
railings, and had already lamed it in one leg, and was much excited , 
by the benevolent sportsmanlike purpose of breaking its other 
three legs, and bringing it down. 

“ ’It ’im agin ! ” cried the boy, as the poor creature leaped ; 

“ and made a dint in his wool.” 

“Let him be !” said Mr. Datchery. “Don’t you see you have 
lamed him V’ \ 

“Yer lie,” returned the sportsman. “E went and lamed isself. 

I see ’im do it, and I giv’ ’im a shy as a Widdy-warning to ’im not - 
to go a bruisin’ ’is master’s mutton any more.” ':ij 

“ Come here.” J i 

“ I won’t ; I’ll come when yer can ketch me.” 

“ Stay there then, and show me which is Mr. Tope’s.” '> I 

“ Ow can I stay here and show you which is Topeseses, when 
Topeseses is t’other side the Kinfreederal, and over the 
and round ever so many corners ? * Stoo-pid ! Ya-a-ah ! ” 

“ Show me where it is, and I’ll give you something.” 

“ Come on, then.” 

This brisk dialogue concluded, the boy led the way, and by-and- 
bye stopped at some distance from an arched passage, pointing. 

“ Lookie yonder. You see that there winder and door ? ” 

“ That’s Tope’s?” 

“ Yer lie ; it ain’t. That’s Jarsper’s.” ■ 

“ Indeed ? ” said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some in- i 
terest. 

“Yes, and I ain^t a goin’ no nearer ’Im, I tell yer.” 

“Why not?” 


crossings, f ' 




THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


507 


“ ’Cos I ain’t a goin’ to be lifted off my legs and ’ave my braces 
bust and be choked ; not if I knows it, and not by ’Im. Wait 
till I set a jolly good flint a flyin’ at the back o’ ’is jolly old ’ed 
some day ! Now look t’other side the harch ; not the side where 
Jarsper’s door is; t’other side.” 

“ I see.” 

“A little way in, o’ that side, there’s a low door, down two steps. 
That’s Topeseses with ’is name on a hoval plate.” 

“Good. See here,” said Mr. Datchery, producing a shilling. 
“You owe me half of this.” 

“ Yer lie ; I don’t owe yer nothing ; I never seen yer.” 

“ I tell you you owe me half of this, because I have no sixpence 
in my pocket. So the next time you meet me you shall do some- 
thing else for me, to pay me.” 

“All right, give us ’old.” 

“ What is your name, and where do you live ? ” 

“ Deputy. Travellers’ Twopenny, ’cross the green.” 

The boy instantly darted off with the shilling, lest Mr. Datchery 
should repent, but stopped at a safe distance, on the happy chance 
of his being uneasy in his mind about it, to goad him with a de- 
mon dance expressive of its irrevocability. 

Mr. Datchery, taking ofl* his hat to give that shock of white hair 
of his another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself 
whither he had been directed. 

Mr. Tope’s official dwelling, communicating by an upper stair 
with Mr. Jasper’s (hence Mrs. Tope’s attendance on that gentleman), 
was of very modest proportions, and partook of the character of a 
cool dungeon. Its ancient walls were massive, and its rooms rather 
seemed to have been dug out of them, than to have been designed 
beforehand with any reference to them. The main door opened at 
once on a chamber of no describable shape, with a groined roof, 
which in its turn opened on another chamber of no describable 
shape, with another groined roof : their windows small, and in the 
thickness of the walls. These two chambers, close as to their 
atmosphere, and swarthy as to their illumination by natural light, 
were the apartments which Mrs. Tope had so long offered to an 
unappreciative city. Mr. Datchery, however, was more apprecia- 
tive. He found that if he sat with the main door open he would 
enjoy the passing society of all comers to and fro by the gateway, 
and would have light enough. He found that if Mr. and Mrs. 
Tope, living overhead, used for their own egress and ingress a little 
side stair that came plump into the Precincts by a door opening 
outward, to the surprise and inconvenience of a limited public of 
pedestrians in a narrow way, he would be alone, as in a separate 


508 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


residence. He found the rent moderate, and everything as quaintly 
inconvenient as he could desire. He agreed, therefore, to take the 
lodging then and there, and money down, possession to be had next 
evening, on condition that reference was permitted him to Mr. 
Jasper as occupying the gatehouse, of which on the other side of 
the gateway, the Verger’s hole-in-the-wall was an appanage or sub- 
sidiary part. 

The poor dear gentleman was very solitary and very sad, Mrs. 
Tope said, but she had no doubt he would “speak for her.” Per- 
haps Mr. Datchery had heard something of what had occurred 
there last winter ^ 

Mr. Datchery had as confused a knowledge of the event in ques- 
tion, on trying to recall it, as he well could have. He begged 
Mrs. Tope’s pardon when she found it incumbent on her to correct 
him in every detail of his summary of the facts, but pleaded that 
he was merely a single buffer getting through life upon his means 
as idly as he could, and that so many people were so constantly 
making away with so many other people, as to render it difl&cult 
for a buffer of an easy temper to preserve the circumstances of the 
several cases unmixed in his mind. 

Mr. Jasper proving willing to speak for Mrs. Tope, Mr. Datch- 
ery, who had sent up his card, was invited to ascend the postern 
staircase. The Mayor was there, Mr. Tope said ; but he was not 
to be regarded in the light of company, as he and Mr. Jasper were 
great friends. 

“I beg pardon,” said Mr. Datchery, making a leg with his hat 
under his arm, as he addressed himself equally to both gentlemen ; 
“a selfish precaution on my part, and not personally interesting 
to anybody but myself. But as a buffer living on his means, and 
having an idea of doing it in this lovely place in peace and quiet, 
for remaining span of life, I beg to ask if the Tope family are 
quite respectable ? ” 

Mr. Jasper could answer for that without the slightest hesitation. 

“ That is enough, sir,” said Mr. Datchery. 

“My friend the Mayor,” added Mr. Jasper, presenting Mr. 
Datchery with a courtly motion of his hand towards that poten- 
tate ; “ whose recommendation is actually much more important to 
a stranger than that of an obscure person like myself, will testify 
in their behalf, I am sure.” 

“The Worshipful the Mayor,” said Mr. Datchery, with a low 
bow, “places me under an infinite obligation.” 

“Very good people,, sir, Mr. and Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Sapsea, 
with condescension. “Very good opinions. Very well behaved. 
Very respectful. Much approved by the Dean and Chapter.” 


I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


509 


“ The Worshipful the Mayor gives them a character,” said Mr. 
Datchery, “of which they may indeed be proud. I would ask 
His Honour (if I might be permitted) whether there are not many 
objects of great interest in the city which is under his beneficent 
sway 1 ” 

“We are, sir,” returned Mr. Sapsea, “an ancient city, and an 
ecclesiastical city. We are a constitutional city, as it becomes 
such a city to be, and we uphold and maintain our glorious privi- 
leges.” 

“His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery, bowing, “inspires me with 
a desire to know more of the city, and confirms me in my inchna- 
tion to end my days in the city.” 

“Retired from the Army, sir?” suggested Mr. Sapsea. 

“ His Honour the Mayor does me too much credit,” returned 
Mr. Datchery. 

“Navy, sir?” suggested Mr. Sapsea. 

“Again,” repeated Mr. Datchery, “His Honour the Mayor does 
me too much credit.” 

“Diplomacy is a fine profession,” said Mr. Sapsea, as a general 
remark. 

“ There, I confess. His Honour the Mayor is too many for me,” 
said Mr. Datchery, with an ingenious smile and bow; “even a 
diplomatic bird must fall to such a gun.” 

Now this was very soothing. Here was a gentleman of a great, 
not to say a grand, address, accustomed to rank and dignity, really 
setting a fine example how to behave to a Mayor. There was 
something in that third-person style of being spoken to, that Mr. 
Sapsea found particularly recognisant of his merits and position. 

“But I crave pardon,” said Mr. Datchery. “His Honour the 
Mayor will bear with me, if for a moment I have been deluded 
into occupying his time, and have forgotten the humble claims 
upon my own, of my hotel, the Crozier.” 

“Not at all, sir,” said Mr. Sapsea. “I am returning home, 
and if you would like to take the exterior of our Cathedral in your 
way, I shall be glad to point it out.” 

“His Honour the Mayor,” said Mr. Datchery, “is more than 
kind and gracious.” 

As Mr. Datchery, when he had made his acknowledgments to 
Mr. Jasper, could not be induced to go out of the room before the 
Worshipful, the Worshipful led the way down-stairs ; Mr. Datch- 
ery following with his hat under his arm, and his shock of white 
hair streaming in the evening breeze. 

“ Might I ask His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery, “ whether that 
gentleman we have just left is the gentleman of whom I have 


510 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


heard in the neighbourhood as being much afflicted by the loss of a p 
nephew, and concentrating his life on avenging the loss?” i 

“ That is the gentleman. John Jasper, sir.” !:j 

“Would His Honour allow me to inquire whether there are ij 
strong suspicions of any one ? ” i 

“More than suspicions, sir,” returned Mr. Sapsea^ “all but I 
certainties.” i 

“ Only think now ! ” cried Mr. Datcherj^ ' 

“ But proof, sir, proof must be built up stone by stone,” said the J 
Mayor. “As I say, the end crowns the work. It is not enough ' 
that Justice should be morally certain ; she must be immorally i 
certain — legally, that is.” 

“ His Honour,” said Mr. Hatchery, “ reminds me of the nature 
of the law. Immoral. How true ! ” 

“As I say, sir,” pompously went on the Mayor, “the 'arm of 
the law is a strong arm, and a long arm. That is the way I put 
it. A strong arm and a long arm.” 

“ How forcible ! — And yet, again, how true ! ” murmured Mr. 
Hatchery. 

“And without betraying what I call the secrets of the prison- 
house,” said Mr. Sapsea ; “ the secrets of the prison-house is the 
term I used on the bench.” 

“ And what other term than His Honour’s would express it ? ” ‘ 
said Mr. Hatchery. 

“ Without, I say, betraying them, I predict to you, knowing 
the iron will of the gentleman we have just left (I take the bold 
step of calling it iron, on account of its strength), that in this case 
the long arm will reach, and the strong arm w31 strike. — This is 
our Cathedral, sir. The best judges are pleased to admire it, and 
the best among our townsmen own to being a little vain of it.” 

All this time Mr. Hatchery had walked with his hat under his 
arm, and his white hair streaming. He had an odd momentary 
appearance upon him of having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea 
now touched it ; and he clapped his hand up to his head as if with 
some vague expectation of finding another hat upon it. 

“Pray be covered, sir,” entreated Mr. Sapsea; magnificently 
implying: “I shall not mind it, I assure you.” 

“ His Honour is very good, but I do it for coolness,” said Mr. 
Hatchery. 

Then Mr. Hatchery admired the Cathedral, and Mr. Sapsea 
pointed it out as if he himself had invented and built it : there 
were a few details indeed of which he did not approve, but those 
he glossed over, as if the workmen had made mistakes in his 
absence. The Cathedral disposed of, he led the way by the 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


511 


churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty of the evening — 
by chance — in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea’s epitaph. 

“ And by-the-bye,” said Mr. Sapsea, appearing to descend from 
an elevation to remember it all of a sudden ; like Apollo shooting 
down from Olympus to pick up his forgotten lyre; “ that is one of 
our small lions. The partiality of our people has made it so, and 
strangers have been seen taking a copy of it now and then. I am 
not a judge of it myself, for it is a little work of my own. But it 
was troublesome to turn, sir; I may say, diflScult to turn with 
elegance.” 

Mr. Batch ery became so ecstatic over Mr. Sapsea’s composition, 
that, in spite of his intention to end his days in Cloisterham, and 
therefore his probably having in reserve many opportunities of 
copying it, he would have transcribed it into his pocket-book 
on the spot, but for the slouching towards them of its material pro- 
ducer and perpetuator, Durdles, whom Mr. Sapsea hailed, not sorry 
to show him a bright example of behaviour to superiors. 

“ Ah, Durdles ! This is the mason, sir ; one of our Cloisterham 
worthies ; everybody here knows Durdles. Mr. Datchery, Dur- 
dles ; a gentleman who is going to settle here.” 

“I wouldn’t do it if I was him,” growled Durdles. “We’re a 
heavy lot.” 

“You surely don’t speak for yourself, Mr. Durdles,” returned 
Mr. Datchery, “any more than for His Honour.” 

“ Who’s His Honour ? ” demanded Durdles. 

“ His Honour the Mayor.” 

“I never was brought afore him,” said Durdles, with anything 
but the look of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, “and it’ll be time 
enough for me to Honour him when I am. Until which, and when, 
and where, 

‘ Mister Sapsea is his name, 

England is his nation, 

Cloisterham’s his dwelling-place, 

Aukshneer’s his occupation.’ ” 

Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying oyster-shell) appeared upon 
the scene, and requested to have the sum of threepence instantly 
“chucked ” to him by Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly seek- 
ing up and down, as lawful wages overdue. While that gentleman, 
with his bundle under his arm, slowly found and counted out the 
money, Mr. Sapsea informed the new settler of Durdles’s habits, 
pursuits, abode, and reputation. “I suppose a curious stranger 
might come to see you, and your works, Mr. Durdles, at any odd 
time ? ” said Mr. Datchery upon that. 

“ Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me any evening if 


512 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


he brings liquor for two with him,” returned Durdles, with a penny ^ j 
between his teeth and certain halfpence in his hands ; “or if he 
likes to make it twice two, he’ll be doubly welcome.” 

“ I shall come. Master Deputy, what do you owe me ? ” 

“ A job.” 

“ Mind you pay me honestly with the job of showing me Mr. 
Durdles’s house when I want to go there.” 

Deputy, with a piercing broadside of whistle through the whole, 
gap in his mouth, as a receipt in full for all arrears, vanished. 

The Worshipful and the Worshipper then passed on together until | 
they parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful’s door ; even ! 
then the Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his^ 
streaming white hair to the breeze. - - 

Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked at his ^.-|j 
white hair in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the coffee-room “ 
chimneypiece at the Crozier, and shook it out: “For a single , 
buffer, of an easy temper, living idly on his means, I have had a ' 
rather busy afternoon ! ” 

CHAPTER XIX. 

SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL. 

Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory address, 
with the accompaniments of white- wine and pound-cake, and again 
the young ladies have departed to their several homes. Helena « 
Landless has left the Nuns’ House to attend her brother’s fortunes, . , , 
and pretty Rosa is alone. 

Cloisterliam is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that 
the Cathedral and the monastery-ruins show as if their strong walls 
were transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them, 
rather than upon them from without, such is their mellowness as 
they look forth on the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that ^ 
distantly wind among them. The Cloisterham gardens blush with 
ripening fruit. Time was when travel-stained pilgrims rode in 
clattering parties through the city’s welcome shades ; time is when 
wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between haymaking time and har- 
vest, and looking as if they were just made of the dust of the earth, 
so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool door-steps, trying to 
mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to the city kennels 
as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles that they carry, 
along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands of straw. At 
all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare feet, to- 
gether with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


513 


spout on the part of these Bedouins ; the Cloisterham police mean- 
while looking askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest 
impatience that the intruders should depart from within the civic 
bounds, and once more fry ^bemselves on the simmering highroads. 

On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral service 
is done, and when that side of the High Street on which the Nuns’ 
House stands is in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden 
opens to the west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs 
Rosa, to her terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see her. 

If he had chosen his time for finding her at a disadvantage, he 
could have done no better. Perhaps he has chosen it. Helena 
Landless is gone, Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave. Miss Twinkleton 
(in her amateur state of existence) has contributed herself and a 
veal pie to a picnic. 

“ 0 why, why, why, did you say I was at home ! ” cries Rosa, 
helplessly. 

The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never asked the question. 
That he said he knew she was at home, and begged she might be 
told that he asked to see her. 

“ What shall I do ! what shall I do ! ” thinks Rosa, clasping her 
hands. 

Possessed by a kind of desperation, she adds in the next breath, 
that she will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden. She shudders at 
the thought of being shut up with him in the house ; but many of 
its windows command the garden, and she can be seen as well as 
heard there, and can shriek in the free air and run away. Such is 
the wild idea that flutters through her mind. 

She has never seen him since the fatal night, except when she 
was questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present in gloomy 
watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge 
him. She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out. The 
moment she sees him from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the 
old horrible feeling of being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon 
her. She feels that she would even then go back, but that he 
draws her feet towards him. She cannot resist, and sits down, 
with her head bent, on the garden-seat beside the sun-dial. She 
cannot look up at him for abhorrence, but she has perceived that 
he is dressed in deep mourning. So is she. It -was not so at first ; 
[but the lost has long been given up, and mourned for, as dead. 

I He would begin by touching her hand. She feels the intention, 
and draws her hand back. His eyes are then fixed upon her, she 
knows, though her own see nothing but the grass. 

“I have been waiting,” he begins, “for some time, to be sum- 
moned back to my duty near you.” 


614 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


After several times forming her lips, which she knows he is 
closely watching, into the shape of some other hesitating reply, 
and then into none, she answers : “Duty, sir ?” 

“ The duty of teaching you, serving you as your faithful music- 
master.” 

“ I have left off that study.” 

“Not left off, I think. Discontinued. I was told by your ; 
guardian that you discontinued it under the shock that we have 
ail felt so acutely. When will you resume ? ” 

“Never, sir.” 

“Never? You could have done no more if you had loved my 
dear boy.” 

“ I did love him ! ” cried Rosa, with a flash of anger. 

“Yes; but not quite — not quite in the right way, shall I say? ' 
Not in the intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy was, J 
unhappily, too self-conscious and self-satisfied (I’ll draw no parallel ; 
between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, j 
or as any one in his place would have loved — must have loved ! ” 

She sits in the same still attitude, but shrinking a little more. 

“ Then, to be told that you discontinued your study with me, i 
was to be politely told that you abandoned it altogether?” he ' 
suggested. j 

“Yes,” says Rosa, with sudden spirit. “The politeness was ! 
my guardian’s, not mine. I told him that I was resolved to leave 
off, and that I was 'determined to stand by my resolution.” 

“ And you still are ? ” 

“ I still am, sir. And I beg not to be questioned any more 
about it. At all events, I will not answer any more ; I have that 
in my power.” 

She is so conscious of his looking at her with a gloating admira- 
tion of the touch of anger on her, and the fire, and animation it 
brings with it, that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and she 
struggles with a sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did 
that night at the piano. 

“I will not question you any more, since you object to it so 
much ; I will confess — ” 

“T do not wish to hear you, sir,” cries Rosa, rising. 

This time he does touch her with his outstretched hand. In 
shrinking from it, she shrinks into her seat again. 

“We must sometimes act in opposition to our wishes,”. he tells 
her in a low voice. “You must do so now, or do more harm to 
others than you can ever set right.” 

“\Vhat harm?” 

“Presently, presently. You question me, you see, and surely 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


515 


that’s not fair when you forbid me to question you. Nevertheless, 
I will answer the question presently. Dearest Rosa ! Charming 
Rosa ! ” 

She starts up again. 

This time he does not touch her. But his face looks so wicked 
and menacing, as he stands leaning against the sun-dial — setting, 
as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day — that her 
flight? is arrested by horror as she looks at him. 

“ I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,” 
[ he says, glancing towards them. “I will not touch you again ; I will 
• come no nearer to you than I am. Sit down, and there will be no 
^ mighty wonder in your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedes- 
tal and speaking with you, remembering all that has h^pened, and 
our shares in it. Sit down, my beloved.” 

She would have gone once more — was all but gone — and once 
more his face, darkly threatening what would follow if she went, 
has stopped her. Looking at him with the expression of the 
instant frozen on her face, she sits down on the seat again. 

“ Rosa, even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved 
you madly ; even when I thought his happiness in having you for 
his wife was certain, I loved you madly ; even when I strove to make 
him more ardently devoted to you, I loved you madly ; even when 
he gave me the picture of your lovely face so carelessly traduced 
by him, which I feigned to hang always in my sight for his sake, 
but worshipped in torment for years, I loved you madly ; in the 
distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, 
girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and 
Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my 
arms, I loved you madly.” 

If anything could make his words more hideous to her than 
they are in themselves, it would be the contrast between the vio- 
lence of his look and delivery, and the composure of his assumed 
attitude. 

“ I endured it all in silence. So long as you were his, or so long 
as I supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally. Did I not?” 

This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so 
true, is more than Rosa can endure. She answers with kindling 
indignation : “You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now. 
You were false to him, daily and hourly. You know that you 
made my life unhappy by your pursuit of me. You know that 
you made me afraid to open his generous eyes, and that you forced 
me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to keep the truth from 
him, that you were a bad, bad man ! ” 

His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working feat- 


516 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


ures and his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, 
with a fierce extreme of admiration : 

“ How beautiful you are ! You are more beautiful in anger than 
in repose. I don’t ask you for your love ; give me yourself and your 
hatred ; give me yourself and that pretty rage ; give me yourself t 
and that enchanting scorn ; it will be enough for me.” 

Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the trembling little beauty, 
and her face flames ; but as she again rises to leave him in indig- i 
nation, and seek protection within the house, he stretches out his ^ 
hand towards the porch, as though he invited her to enter it. I 

“ I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet witch, that you must 
stay and hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone. You 
asked me what harm. Stay, and I will tell you. Go, and I 
will do it ! ^ 

Again Rosa quails before his threatening face, though innocent of ^ 
its meaning, and she remains. Her panting breathing comes and 
goes as if it would choke her ; but with a repressive hand upon 
her bosom, she remains. 

“I have made my confession that my love is mad. It is so i 
mad, that had the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one < 
silken thread less strong, I might have swept even him from your > 
side when you favoured him.” 

A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though ■ 
he had turned her faint. 

“Even him,” he repeats. “Yes, even him ! Rosa, you see me 
and you hear me. Judge for yourself whether any other admirer 
shall love you and live, whose life is in my hand.” 

“ What do you mean, sir ? ” 

“ I mean to show you how mad my love is. It was hawked 
through the late inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless 
had confessed to him that he was a rival of my lost boy. That is 
an inexpiable offence in my eyes. The same Mr. Crisparkle knows 
under my hand that I have devoted myself to the murderer’s dis- 
covery and destruction, be he whom he might, and that I deter- 
mined to discuss the mystery with no one until I should hold the 
clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net. I have since 
worked patiently to wind and wind it round him ; and it is slowly 
winding as I speak.” 

“ Your belief, if you believe in the criminality of Mr. Landless, is 
not Mr. Crisparkle’s belief, and he is a good man,” Rosa retorts. 

“ My belief is my own ; and I reserve it, worshipped of my soul ! 
Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent 
man^ that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. 
One wanting link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, 


r 




*v 

f *^0 

S^. 


jSE^^ 

sBbtsL/ ' - 1 











jasper’s sacrifices. 




618 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


proves his guilt, however slight its evidence before, and he dies. 
Young Landless stands in deadly peril either way.” 

“If you really suppose,” Rosa pleads with him, turning paler, 

“ that I favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has ever in any 
way addressed himself to me, you are wrong.” 

He puts that from him with a slighting action of his hand and a j 
curled lip. | 

“ I was going to show you how madly I love you. More madly 
now than ever, for I am willing to renounce the second object that ' 
has arisen in my life to divide it with you ; and henceforth to have 
no object in existence but you only. Miss Landless has become 
your bosom friend. You care for her peace of mind ? ” 

“ I love her dearly.” | 

“ You care for her good name ? ” 'I 

“I have said, sir, I love her dearly.” 

“ I am unconsciously,” he observes with a smile, as he folds his 
hands upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so that his 
talk would seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go 
there) to be of the airiest and playfullest — “I am unconsciously 
giving offence by questioning again. I will simply make statements, 
therefore, and not put questions. You do care for your bosom 
friend’s good name, and you do care for her peace of mind. Then 
remove the shadow of the gallows from her, dear one ! ” 

“You dare propose to me to — ” 

“ Darling, I dare propose to you. Stop there. If it be bad to 
idolise you, I am the worst of men ; if it be good, I am the best. 

My love for you is above all other love, and my truth to you is 
above all other truth. Let me have hope and favour, and I am a 
forsworn man for your sake.” 

Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and, pushing back her hair, 
looks wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were trying to 
piece together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in 
fragments. 

“ Reckon up nothing at this moment, angel, but the sacrifices 
that I lay at those dear feet, which I could fall down among the 
vilest ashes and kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage might. 
There is my fidelity to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it ! ” 
With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something 
precious. 

“ There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you. 
Spurn it ! ” 

With a similar action. 

“ There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six 
toiling months. Crush them ! ”' 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


519 


With another repetition of the action. 

“ There is my past and my present wasted life. There is the 
desolation of my heart and soul. There is my peace ; there is my 
despair. Stamp them into the dust ; so that you take me, were 
it even mortally hating me ! ” 

The frightful vehemence of the man, now reaching its full height, 
so additionally terrifies her as to break the spell that has held her to 
the spot. She swiftly moves towards the porch ; but in an instant 
he is at her side, and speaking in her ear. 

“ Rosa, I am self-repressed again. I am walking calmly beside 
you to the house. I shall wait for some encouragement and hope. 
I shall not strike too soon. Give me a sign that you attend to 
me.” 

She slightly and constrainedly moves her hand. 

“ Not a word of this to any one, or it will bring down the blow, 
as certainly as night follows day. Another sign that you attend 
to me.” 

She moves her hand once more. 

“ I love you, love you, love you ! If you were to cast me off* 
now — but you will not — you would never be rid of me. No one 
should come between us. I would pursue you to the death.” 

The handmaid coming out to open the gate for him, he quietly 
pulls off* his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with no greater 
show of agitation than is visible in the efl5gy of Mr. Sapsea’s father 
opposite. Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to 
her room and laid down on her bed. A thunderstorm is coming on, 
the maids say, and the hot and stiffing air has overset the pretty 
dear ; no wonder ; they have felt their own knees all of a tremble 
all day long. 


CHAPTER XX. 

A FLIGHT. 

Rosa no sooner came to herself than the whole of the late interview 
was before her. It even seemed as if it had pursued her into her 
insensibility, and she had not had a moment’s unconsciousness of it. 
What to do, she was at a frightened loss to know ; the only one clear 
thought in her mind was, that she must fly from this terrible man. 

But where could she take refuge, and how could she go ? She 
had never breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena. If 
she went to Helena, and told her what had passed, that very act 
might bring down the irreparable mischief that he threatened he 
had the power, and that she knew he had the will, to do. The 


520 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


more fearful he appeared to her excited memory and imagination, 
the more alarming her responsibility appeared ; seeing that a 
slight mistake on her part, either in action or delay, might let his 
malevolence loose on Helena’s brother. 

Rosa’s mind throughout the last six months had been stormily 
confused. A half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion tossed in it, 
now heaving itself up, and now sinking into the deep ; now gaining 
palpability, and now losing it. Jasper’s self-absorption in his 
nephew when he was alive, and his unceasing pursuit of the in- 
quiry how he came by his death, if he were dead, were themes 
so rife in the place, that no one appeared able to suspect the 
possibility of foul play at his hands. She had asked herself the 
question, “ Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to conceive a wicked- 
ness that others cannot imagine ? ” Then she had considered. Did 
the suspicion come of her previous recoiling from him before the 
fact ? And if so, was not that a proof of its baselessness ? Then 
she had reflected, “ What motive could he have, according to my 
accusation?” She was ashamed to answer in her mind, “The 
motive of gaining me / ” And covered her face, as if the lightest 
shadow of the idea of founding murder on such an idle vanity were 
a crime almost as great. 

She ran over in her mind again, all that he had said by the sun- 
dial in the garden. He had persisted in treating the disappearance 
as murder, consistently with his whole public course since the 
finding of the watch and shirt-pin. If he were afraid of the crime 
being traced out, would he not rather encourage the idea of a vol- 
untary disappearance? He had even declared that if the ties 
between him and his nephew had been less strong, he might have 
swept “even him ” away from her side. Was that like his having 
really done so ? He had spoken of laying his six months’ labours 
in the cause of a just vengeance at her feet. Would he have done 
that, with that violence of passion, if they were a pretence? 
Would he have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his 
wasted life, his peace and his despair? The very first sacrifice 
that he represented himself as making for her, was his fidelity to 
his dear boy after death. Surely these facts were strong against a 
fancy that scarcely dared to hint itself. And yet he was so terrible 
a man ! In short, the poor girl (for what could she know of the 
criminal intellect, which its own professed students perpetually 
misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the 
average intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a 
horrible wonder apart) could get by no road to any other conclusion 
than that he was a terrible man, and must be fled from. 

She had been Helena’s stay and comfort during the whole time. 


I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 521 

She had constantly assured her of her full belief in her brother’s 
innocence, and of her sympathy with him in his misery. But she 
had never seen him since the disappearance, nor had Helena ever 
spoken one word of his avowal to Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, 
though as a part of the interest of the case it was well known 
far and wide. He was Helena’s unfortunate brother, to her, and 
nothing more. The assurance she had given her odious suitor was 
strictly true, though it would have been better (she considered now) 
if she could have restrained herself from so giving it. Afraid of 
him as the bright and delicate little creature was, her spirit swelled 
at the thought of his knowing it from her own lips. 

But where was she to go? Anywhere beyond his reach, was 
no reply to the question. Somewhere must be thought of. She 
determined to go to her guardian, and to go immediately. The 
feeling she had imparted to Helena on the night of their first con- 
fidence, was so strong upon her — the feeling of not being safe 
from him, and of the solid walls of the old convent being powerless 
to keep out his ghostly following of her — that no reasoning of 
her own could calm her terrors. The fascination of repulsion had 
been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that she felt 
as if he had power to bind her by a spell. Glancing out at window, 
even now, as she rose to dress, the sight of the sun-dial on which 
he had leaned when he declared himself, turned her cold, and made 
her shrink from it as though he had invested it with some awful 
quality from his own nature. 

She wrote a hurried note to Miss Twinkleton, saying that she 
had sudden reason for wishing to see her guardian promptly, and 
had gone to him ; also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy, 
for all was well with her. She hurried a few quite useless articles 
into a very little bag, left the note in a conspicuous place, and went 
out, softly closing the gate after her. 

It was the first time she had ever been even in Cloisterham 
High-street alone. But knowing all its ways and windings very 
well, she hurried straight to the corner from which the omnibus 
departed. It was, at that very moment, going off. 

“ Stop and take me, if you please, Joe. I am obliged to go to 
London.” 

In less than another minute she was on her road to the railway, 
under Joe’s protection. Joe waited on her when she got there, put 
her safely into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little 
bag after her, as though it were some enormous trunk, hundred- 
weights heavy, which she must on no account endeavour to lift. 

“Can you go round when you get back, and tell Miss Twinkle- 
ton that you saw me safely off, Joe?” 


522 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ It shall be done, Miss.” 

“ With my love, please, Joe.” 

“Yes, Miss — and I wouldn’t mind having it myself!” But 
Joe did not articulate the last clause ; only thought it. 

Now that she was whirling away for London in real earnest, 
Rosa was at leisure to resume the thoughts which her personal 
hurry had checked. The indignant thought that his declaration of 
love soiled her ; that she could only be cleansed from the stain of its 
impurity by appealing to the honest and true ; supported her for 
a time against her fears, and confirmed her in her hasty resolution. 
But as the evening grew darker and darker, and the great city 
impended nearer and nearer, the doubts usual in such cases began to 
arise. Whether this was not a wild proceeding, after all ; how Mr. 
Grewgious might regard it ; whether she should find him at the jour- > 
ney’s end ; how she would act if he were absent ; what might become 
of her, alone, in a place so strange and crowded ; how if she had but 
waited and taken counsel first ; whether, if she could now go back, 
she would not do it thankfully ; a multitude of such uneasy specu- 
lations disturbed her, more and more as they accumulated. At length i 
the train came into London over the housetops ; and down below j 
lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps aglow, on a 1 
hot light summer night. 

“ Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.” This was i 
all Rosa knew of her destination ; but it was enough to send her 
rattling away again in a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where 
many people crowded at the corner of courts and byways to get 
some air, and where many other people walked with a miserably 
monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on hot paving-stones, and 
where all the people and all their surroundings were so gritty and 
so shabby 1 

There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven 
the case. No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum 
beat dull care away. Like the chapel bells that were also going 
here and there, they only seemed to evoke echoes from brick 
surfaces, and dust from everything. As to the flat wind-instru- 
ments, they seemed to have cracked their hearts and souls in 
pining for the country. 

Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, 
which appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very 
early, and was much afraid of housebreakers ; Rosa, discharging 
her conveyance, timi.dly knocked at this gateway, and was let in, 
very little bag and all, by a watchman. 

“ Does Mr. Grewgious live here ? ” 

“ Mr. Grewgious lives there. Miss,” said the watchman, pointing 
further in. I 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


523 


So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, 
stood on P. J. T.’s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done 
with his street-door. 

Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up- 
stairs and softly tapped and tapped several times. But no one 
answering, and Mr. Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, 
she went in, and saw her guardian sitting on a window-seat at an 
open window, with a shaded lamp placed far from him on a table 
in a corner. 

Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room. He saw 
her, and he said, in an undertone ; “ Good Heaven ! ” 

Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning 
her embrace : 

“ My child, my child ! I thought you were your mother ! — But 
what, what, what,” he added, soothingly, “has happened? My 
dear, what has brought you here? Who has brought you here?” 

“Ho one. I came alone.” 

“Lord bless me!” ejaculated Mr. Grewgious. “Came alone I 
Why didn’t you write to me to come and fetch you ? ” 

“I had no time. I took a sudden resolution. Poor, poor 
Eddy ! ” 

“ Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow 1 ” 

“ His uncle has made love to me. I cannot bear it,” said Rosa, 
at once with a burst of tears, and the stamp of her little foot ; “ I 
shudder with horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me 
and all of us from him, if you will?” 

“I will,” cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing 
energy. “ Damn him 1 

‘ Confound his politics ! 

Frustrate his knavish tricks 1 

On Thee his hopes to fix ? 

Damn him again ! ”’ 

After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite 
beside himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided 
whether he was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunci- 
ation. 

He stopped and said, wiping his face ; “ I beg your pardon, my 
dear, but you will be glad to know I feel better. Tell me no more 
just now, or I might do it again. \ ou must be refreshed and 
cheered. What did you take last ? AVas it breakfast, lunch, din- 
ner, tea, or supper ? And what will you take next ? Shall it be 
breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper ? ” 

The respectful tenderness with which, on one knee before her, 


524 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


lie helped her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair 
from it, was quite a chivalrous sight. Yet who, knowing him 
only on the surface, would have expected chivalry — and of the 
true sort, too ; not the spurious — from Mr. Grewgious ? 

“Your rest too must be provided for,” he went on ; “and you 
shall have the prettiest chamber in Furnival’s. Your toilet must be 
provided for, and you shall have everything that an unlimited head 
chambermaid — by which expression I mean a head chambermaid 
not limited as to outlay — can procure. Is that a bag ? ” he looked 
hard at it ; sooth to say, it required hard looking at to be seen at 
all in a dimly lighted room : “ and is it your property, my dear ? ” 

“Yes, sir. I brought it with me.” 

“It is not an extensive bag,” said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, 
“though admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a 
canary-bird. Perhaps you brought a canary-bird ? ” 

Rosa smiled and shook her head. 

“If you had, he should have been made welcome,” said Mr. 
Grewgious, “and I think he would have been pleased to be hung 
upon a nail outside and pit himself against our Staple sparrows ; 
whose execution must be admitted to be not quite equal to their 
intention. AVhich is the case with so many of us ! You didn’t 
say what meal, my dear. Have a nice jumble of all meals.” 

Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea. 
Mr. Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to 
mention such supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, water- 
cresses, salted fish, and frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s with- 
out his hat, to give his various directions. And soon afterwards 
they were realised in practice, and the board was spread. 

“Lord bless my soul,” cried .Mr. Grewgious, putting the lamp 
upon it, and taking his seat opposite Rosa ; “ what a new sensa- 
tion for a poor old Angular bachelor, to be sure ! ” 

Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant ? 

“ The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, 
that whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gild- 
ing, and makes it Glorious ! ” said Mr. Grewgious. “ Ah me ! Ah 
me ! ” 

As there was something mournful in his sigh, Rosa, in touching 
him with her tea-cup, ventured to touch him with her small hand 
too. 

“Thank you, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ahem ! Let’s 
talk ! ” 

“Do you always live here, sir ?” asked Rosa. 

“Yes, my dear.” 

“ And always alone ” 


i 



MR. GREWGIOUS EXPERIENCES A NEW SENSATION 






526 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Always alone ; except that I have daily company in a gentle- 
man by the name of Bazzard, my clerk.” 

“ He doesn’t live here ? ” 

“ No, he goes his way, after oflSce hours. In fact, he is off duty 
here, altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with 
which I have business relations, lend me a substitute: But it 
would be extremely difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.” 

“ He must be very fond of you,” said Rosa. 

“He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,” 
returned Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter. “But I 
doubt if he is. Not particularly so. You see, he is discontented, 
poor fellow.” 

“Why isn’t he contented?” was the natural inquiry. 

“Misplaced,” said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery. 

Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expres- 
sion. 

“So misplaced,” Mr. Grewgious went on, “that I feel constantly 
apologetic towards him. And he feels (though he doesn’t mention 
it) that I have reason to be.” 

Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that 
Rosa did not know how to go on. While she was thinking about it 
Mr. Grewgious suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time : 

“ Let’s talk. We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard. It’s a secret, 
and moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret ; but the sweet presence at 
my table makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must im- 
part it in inviolable confidence. What do you think Mr. Bazzard 
has done ? ” 

“ 0 dear ! ” cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her 
mind reverting to Jasper, “ nothing dreadful, I hope ? ” 

“He has written a play,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn 
whisper. “ A tragedy.” 

Rosa seemed much relieved. 

“And nobody,” pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, “will 
hear, on any account whatever, of bringing it out.” 

Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly ; as who 
should say, “ Such things are, and why are they ! ” 

“Now, you know,” said Mr. Grewgious, “/ couldn’t write a 
play.” 

“Not a bad one, sir?” said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows 
again in action. 

“No. If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about 
to be instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon 
for the condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should 
be under the necessity of resuming the block, and begging the exe- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


527 


cutioner to proceed to extremities, — meaning,” said Mr. Grew- 
gious, passing his hand under his chin, “ the singular number, and 
this extremity.” 

Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward 
supposititious case were hers. 

“ Consequently,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ Mr. Bazzard would have 
a sense of my inferiority to himself under any circumstances ; but 
when I am his master, you know, the case is greatly aggravated.” 

Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence 
to be a little too much, though of his own committing. 

“How came you to be his master, sir?” asked Rosa. 

“ A question that naturally follows,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Let’s 
talk. Mr. Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have 
furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitchfork, and every agri- 
cultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slight- 
est hint of his son’s having written a play. So the son, bringing 
to me the father’s rent (which I receive), imparted his secret, and 
pointed out that he was determined to pursue his genius, and that 
it would put him in peril of starvation, and that he was not formed 
for it.” 

“ For pursuing his genius, sir ? ” 

“No, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, “for starvation. It was 
impossible to deny the position, that Mr. Bazzard was not formed 
to be starved, and Mr. Bazzard then pointed out that it was desir- 
able that I should stand between him and a fate so perfectly un- 
suited to his formation. In that way* Mr. Bazzard became my 
clerk, and he feels it very much.” 

“I am glad he is grateful,” said Rosa. 

“ I didn’t quite mean that, my dear. I mean, that he feels the 
degradation. There are some other geniuses that Mr. Bazzard has 
become acquainted with, who have also written tragedies, which 
likewise nobody will on any account whatever hear of bringing out, 
and these choice spirits dedicate their plays to one another in a 
highly panegyrical manner. Mr. Bazzard has been the subject of 
one of these dedications. Now, you know, I never had a play dedi- 
cated to me I ” 

Rosa looked at him as if she would have liked him to be the 
recipient of a thousand dedications. 

“Which again, naturally, rubs against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,” 
said Mr. Grewgious. “ He is very short with me sometimes, and 
then I feel that he is meditating, ‘ This blockhead is my master ! 
A fellow who couldn’t write a tragedy on pain of death, and who 
will never have one dedicated to him with the most complimentary 
congratulations on the high position he has taken in the eyes of 


528 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, 


posterity ! ’ Very trying, very trying. However, in giving him 
directions, I reflect beforehand : ‘ Perhaps he may not like this,’ 
or ‘ He might take it ill if I asked that ; ’ and so we get on very 
well. Indeed, better than I could have expected.” 

“ Is the tragedy named, sir ? ” asked Rosa. 

“Strictly between ourselves,” answered Mr. Grewgious, “it has 
a dreadfully appropriate name. It is called The Thorn of Anxiety. 
But Mr. Bazzard hopes — and I hope — that it will come out at 
last.” 

It was not hard to divine that Mr. Grewgious had related the 
Bazzard history thus fully, at least quite as much for the recreation 
of his ward’s mind from the subject that had driven her there, as 
for the gratification of his own tendency to be social and communi- 
cative. 

“And now, my dear,” he said at this point, “if you are not too 
tired to tell me more of what passed to-day — but only if you feel 
quite able — I should be glad to hear it. I may digest it the 
better, if I sleep on it to-night.” 

Rosa, composed now, gave him a faithful account of the inter- 
view. Mr. Grewgious often smoothed his head while it was in 
progress, and begged to be told a second time those parts which 
bore on Helena and Neville. When Rosa had finished, he sat 
grave, silent, and meditative for a while. 

“Clearly narrated,” was his only remark at last, “and, I hope, 
clearly put away here,” smoothing his head again. “ See, my dear,” 
taking her to the open window, “ where they live ! The dark 
windows over yonder.” 

“ I may go to Helena to-morrow ? ” asked Rosa. 

“ I should like to sleep on that question to-night,” he answered 
doubtfully. “ But let me take you to your own rest, for you must 
need it.” 

With that Mr. Grewgious helped her to get her hat on again, 
and hung upon his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly 
use, and led her by the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, 
as if he were going to walk a minuet) across Holborn, and into 
Furnival’s Inn. At the hotel door, he confided her to the Unlim- 
ited head chambermaid, and said that while she went up to see her 
room, he would remain below, in case she should wish it exchanged 
for another, or should find that there was anything she wanted. 

Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay. The Un- 
limited had laid in everything omitted from the very little bag 
(that is to say, everything she could possibly need), and Rosa 
tripped down the great many stairs again, to thank her guardian 
for his thoughtful and affectionate care of her. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


529 


‘.‘Not at all, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified ; 
“ it is I who thank you for your charming confidence and for your 
charming company. Your breakfast will be provided for you in a 
neat, compact, and graceful little sitting-room (appropriate to your 
figure), and I will come to you at ten o’clock in the morning. I 
hope you don’t feel very strange indeed, in this strange place.” 

“ 0 no, I feel so safe ! ” 

“Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fire-proof,” said Mr. 
Grewgious, “ and that any outbreak'of the devouring element would 
be perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.” 

“ I did not mean that,” Rosa replied. “ I mean, I feel so safe 
from him.” 

“ There is a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,” said Mr. 
Grewgious smiling; “and Furnival’s is fire-proof, and specially 
watched and lighted, and / live over the way ! ” In the stoutness 
of his knight-errantry, he seemed to think the last-named protec- 
tion all-sufficient. In the same spirit he said to the gate-porter 
as he went out, “ If some one staying in the hotel should wish to 
send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for 
the messenger.” In the same spirit, he walked up and down out- 
side the iron gate for the best part of an hour, with some solicitude ; 
occasionally looking in between the bars, as if he had laid a dove 
in a high roost in a cage of lions, and had it on his mind that she 
might tumble out. 


CHAPTER XXI. 

A RECOGNITION. 

Nothing occurred in the night to flutter the tired dove ; and 
the dove arose refreshed. With Mr. Grewgious, when the clock 
struck ten in the morning, came Mr. Crisparkle, who had come at 
one plunge out of the river at Cloisterham. 

“Miss Twinkleton was so uneasy. Miss Rosa,” he explained to 
her, “and came round to Ma and me with your note, in such a 
state of wonder, that, to' quiet her, I volunteered on this service 
by the very first train to be caught in the morning. I wished at 
the time that you had come to me ; but now I think it best that 
you did as you did, and came to your guardian.” 

“ I did think of you,” Rosa told him ; “but Minor Canon Corner 
was so near him — ” 

“ I understand. It was quite natural.” 

“ I have told Mr. Crisparkle,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ all that 
you told me last night, my dear. Of course I should have written 

2 M 


530 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


it to him immediately ; but his coming was most opportune. And 
it was particularly kind of him to come, for he had but just gone.” 

“Have you settled,” asked Rosa, appealing to them both, “what 
is to be done for Helena and her brother ? ” 

“ Why really,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “ I am in great perplexity. If 
even Mr. Grewgious, whose head is much longer than mine, and 
who is a whole night’s cogitation in advance of me, is undecided, 
what must I be ! ” 

The Unlimited here put her Head in at the door — after having 
rapped, and been authorised to present herself — announcing that 
a gentleman wished for a word with another gentleman named 
Crisparkle, if any such gentleman were there. If no such gentle- 
man were there, he begged pardon for being mistaken. 

“ Such a gentleman is here,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “ but is engaged 
just now.” 

“ Is it a dark gentleman ? ” interposed Rosa, retreating on her 
guardian. 

“No, Miss, more of a brown gentleman.” 

“You are sure not with black hair 1 ” asked Rosa, taking courage. 

“ Quite sure of that. Miss. Brown hair and blue eyes.” 

“Perhaps,” hinted Mr. Grewgious, with habitual caution, “it 
might be well to see him, reverend sir, if you don’t object. When 
one is in a difficulty or at a loss, one never knows in what direction 
a way out may chance to open. It is a business principle of mine, 
in such, a case, not to close up any direction, but to keep an eye on 
every direction that may present itself. I could relate an anecdote 
in point, but that it would be premature.” 

“ If Miss Rosa will allow me, then ? Let the gentleman come 
in,” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

The gentleman came in ; apologised, with a frank but modest 
grace, for not finding Mr. Crisparkle alone ; turned to Mr. Crispar- 
kle, and smilingly asked the unexpected question: “Who am I?” 

“You are the gentleman I saw smoking under the trees in Staple 
Inn, a few minutes ago.” 

“ True. There I saw you. Who else am I ? ” 

Mr. Crisparkle concentrated his attention on a handsome face, 
much sunburnt ; and the ghost of some departed boy seemed to 
rise, gradually and dimly, in the room. 

The gentleman saw a struggling recollection lighten up the Minor 
Canon’s features, and smiling again, said : “ What will you have 
for breakfast this morning? You are out of jam.” 

“ Wait a moment ! ” cried Mr. Crisparkle, raising his right hand. 
“ Give me another instant ! Tartar ! ” 

The two shook hands with the greatest heartiness, and then 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


531 


went the wonderful length — for Englishmen — of laying their 
hands each on the other’s shoulders, and looking joyfully each into 
the other’s face. 

“My old fag ! ” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ My old master ! ” said Mr. Tartar. 

“You saved me from drowning ! ” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ After which you took to swimming, you know ! ” said Mr. 
Tartar. 

“ God bless my soul ! ” said Mr. Crisparkle. 

“ Amen ! ” said Mr. Tartar. 

And then they fell to shaking hands most heartily again. 

“Imagine,” exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle, with glistening eyes: 
“ Miss Rosa Bud and Mr. Grewgious, imagine Mr. Tartar, when he 
was the smallest of juniors, diving for me, catching me, a big heavy 
senior, by the hair of the head, and striking out for the shore with 
me like a water-giant ! ” 

“ Imagine my not letting him sink, as I was his fag ! ” said Mr. 
Tartar. “ But the truth being that he was my best protector and 
friend, and did me more good than all the masters put together, an 
irrational impulse seized me to pick him up, or go down with him.” 

“ Hem ! Permit me, sir, to have the honour,” said Mr. Grew- 
gious, advancing with extended hand, “ for an honour I truly esteem 
it. I am proud to make your acquaintance. I hope you didn’t 
take cold. I hope you were not inconvenienced by swallowing too 
much water. How have you been since 1 ” 

It was by no means apparent that Mr. Grewgious knew what he 
said, though it was very apparent that he meant to say something 
highly friendly and appreciative. 

If Heaven, Rosa thought, had but sent such courage and skill 
to her poor mother’s aid ! And he to have been so slight and 
young then ! 

“I don’t wish to be complimented upon it, I thank you; but I 
think I have an idea,” Mr. Grewgious announced, after taking a 
jog-trot or two across the room, so unexpected and unaccountable 
that they all stared at him, doubtful whether he was choking or 
had the cramp — “I think I have an idea. I believe I have had 
the pleasure of seeing Mr. Tartar’s name as tenant of the top set in 
the house next the top set in the corner ? ” 

“Yes, sir,” returned Mr. Tartar. “You are right so far.” 

“ I am right so far,” said Mr. Grewgious. “ Tick that off ; ” 
which he did, with his right thumb on his left. “ Might you hap- 
pen to know the name of your neighbour in the top set on the other 
side of the party-wall ? ” coming very close to Mr. Tartar, to lose 
nothing of his face, in his shortness of sight. 


532 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“ Landless.” 

“ Tick that off,” said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and 
then coming back. “No personal knowledge, I suppose, sir?” 

“ Slight, but some.” 

“ Tick that off,” said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and 
again coming back. “ Nature of knowledge, Mr. Tartar ? ” 

“ I thought he seemed to be a young fellow in a poor way, and 
I asked his leave — only within a day or so — to share my flowers 
up there with him ; that is to say, to extend my flower-garden to 
his windows.” 

“Would you have the kindness to take seats?” said Mr. Grew- 
gious. “ I have an idea ! ” 

They complied ; Mr. Tartar none the less readily, for being all 
abroad •, and Mr. Grewgious, seated in the centre, with his hands 
upon his knees, thus stated his idea, with his usual manner of 
having got the statement by heart. 

“ I cannot as yet make up my min'd whether it is prudent to 
hold open communication under present circumstances, and on the 
part of the fair member of the present company, with Mr. Neville 
or Miss Helena. I have reason to know that a local friend of ours 
(on whom I beg to bestow a passing but a hearty malediction, with 
the kind permission of my reverend friend) sneaks to and fro, and 
dodges up and down. When not doing so himself, he may have some 
informant skulking about, in the person of a watchman, porter, or 
such-like hanger-on of Staple. On the other hand. Miss Rosa very 
naturally wishes to see her friend Miss Helena, and it would seem 
important that at least Miss Helena (if not her brother too, through 
her) should privately know from Miss Rosa’s lips what has occurred, 
and what has been threatened. Am I agreed with generally in the 
views I take ? ” 

“I entirely coincide with them,” said Mr. Crisparkle, who had 
been very attentive. 

“As I have no doubt I should,” added Mr. Tartar, smiling, 
“if I understood them.” 

“Fair and softly, sir,” said Mr. Grewgious; “we shall fully 
confide in you directly, if you will favour us with your permission. 
Now, if our local friend should have any informant on the spot, it 
is tolerably clear that such informant can only be set to watch the 
chambers in the occupation of Mr. Neville. He reporting, to our 
local friend, who comes and goes there, our local friend would sup- 
ply for himself, from his own previous knowledge, the identity of 
the parties. Nobody can be set to watch all Staple, or to concern 
himself with comers and goers to other sets of chambers : unless, 
indeed, mine.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


633 


“ I begin to understand to what you tend,” said Mr. Crisparkle, 
“ and highly approve of your caution.” 

“I needn’t repeat that I know nothing yet of the why and 
wherefore,” said Mr. Tartar ; “ but I also understand to what you 
tend, so let me say at once that my chambers are freely at your 
disposal.” 

“ There ! ” cried Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head triumphantly, 
“ now we have all got the idea. You have it, my dear ? ” 

“I think I have,” said Rosa, blushing a little as Mr. Tartar 
looked quickly towards her. 

“You see, you go over to Staple with Mr. Crisparkle and Mr. 
Tartar,” said Mr. Grewgious ; “I going in and out, and out and 
in alone, in my usual way ; you go up with those gentlemen to 
Mr. Tartar’s rooms ; you look into Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden ; 
you wait for Miss Helena’s appearance there, or you signify to 
Miss Helena that you are close by ; and you communicate with 
her freely, and no spy can be the wiser.” 

“ I am very much afraid I shall be — ” 

“Be what, my dear?” asked Mr. Grewgious, as she hesitated. 
“Not frightened?” 

“No, not that,” said Rosa, shyly ; “in Mr. Tartar’s way. We 
seem to be appropriating Mr. Tartar’s residence so very coolly.” 

“I protest to you,” returned that gentleman, “that I shall 
think the better of it for evermore, if your voice sounds in it only 
once.” 

Rosa, not quite knowing what to say about that, cast down her 
eyes, and turning to Mr. Grewgious, dutifully asked if she should 
put her hat on ? Mr. Grewgious being of opinion that she could 
not do better, she withdrew for the purpose. Mr. Crisparkle took 
the opportunity of giving Mr. Tartar a summary of the distresses 
of Neville and his sister; the opportunity was quite long enough, 
as the hat happened to require a little extra fitting on. 

Mr. Tartar gave his arm to Rosa, and Mr. Crisparkle walked, 
detached, in front. 

“ Poor, poor Eddy ! ” thought Rosa, as they went along. 

Mr. Tartar waved his right hand as he bent his head down over 
Rosa, talking in an animated way. 

“ It was not so powerful or so sun-browned when it saved Mr. 
Crisparkle,” thought Rosa, glancing at it ; “but it must have been 
very steady and determined even then.” 

Mr. Tartar told her he had been a sailor, roving everywhere for 
years and years. 

“ When are you going to sea again ? ” asked Rosa. 

“ Never ! ” 


534 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


Rosa wondered what the girls would say if they could see her 
crossing the wide street on the sailor’s arm. And she fancied that 
the passers-by must think her very little and very helpless, con- 
trasted with the strong figure that could have caught her up and 
carried her out of any danger, miles and miles without resting. 

She was thinking further, that his far-seeing blue eyes looked 
as if they had been used to watch danger afar off", and to watch it 
without flinching, drawing nearer and nearer : when, happening to 
raise her own eyes, she found that he seemed to be thinking some- 
thing about them. 

This a little confused Rosebud, and may account for her never 
afterwards quite knowing how she ascended (with his help) to his 
garden in the air, and seemed to get into a marvellous country 
that came into sudden bloom like the country on the summit of 
the magic bean-stalk. May it flourish for ever ! 


CHAPTER XXII. 

A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON. 

Me. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the 
best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars. 
The floors were scrubbed to that extent, that you might have sup- 
posed the London blacks emancipated for ever, and gone out of the 
land for good. Every inch of brass-work in Mr. Tartar’s posses- 
sion was polished and burnished, till it shone like a brazen mirror. 
No speck, nor spot, nor spatter soiled the purity of any of Mr. 
Tartar’s household gods, large, small, or middle-sized. His sitting- 
room was like the admiral’s cabin, his bath-room was like a dairy, 
his sleeping-chamber, fitted all about with lockers and drawers, 
was like a seedsman’s shop ; and his nicely-balanced cot just stirred 
in the midst, as if it breathed. Everything belonging to Mr. 
Tartar had quarters of its own assigned to it : his maps and charts 
had their quarters ; his books had theirs ; his brushes had theirs ; 
his boots had theirs ; his clothes had theirs ; his case-bottles had 
theirs; his telescopes and other instruments had theirs. Eveiy- 
thing was readily accessible. Shelf, bracket, locker, hook, and 
drawer were equally within reach, and were equally contrived with 
a view to avoiding waste of room, and providing some snug inches 
of stowage for something that would have exactly fitted nowhere 
else. His gleaming little service of plate was so arranged upon 
his sideboard as that a slack salt-spoon would have instantly be- 
trayed itself; his toilet implements were so arranged upon his 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


535 


dressing-table as that a toothpick of slovenly deportment could 
have been reported at a glance. So with the curiosities he had 
brought home from various voyages. Stuffed, dried, repolished, or 
otherwise preserved, according to their kind ; birds, fishes, reptiles, 
arms, articles of dress, shells, seaweeds, grasses, or memorials of 
coral reef ; each was displayed in its especial place, and each could 
have been displayed in no better place. Paint and varnish seemed 
to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to obliter- 
ate stray finger-marks wherever any might become perceptible in 
Mr. Tartar’s chambers. No man-of-war was ever kept more spick 
and span from careless touch. On this bright summer day, a neat 
awning was rigged over Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden as only a sailor 
could rig it ; and there was a sea-going air upon the whole effect, 
so delightfully complete, that the flower-garden might have apper- 
tained to stern-window^s afloat, and the whole concern might have 
bowled away gallantly with all on board, if Mr. Tartar had only 
clapped to his lips the speaking-trumpet that was slung in a cor- 
ner, and given hoarse orders to heave the anchor up, look alive 
there, men, and get all sail upon her ! 

Mr. Tartar doing the honours of this gallant craft was of a piece 
with the rest. When a man rides an amiable hobby that shies at 
nothing and kicks nobody, it is only agreeable to And him riding 
it with a humorous sense of the droll side of the creature. 
When the man is a cordial and an earnest man by nature, and withal 
is perfectly fresh and genuine, it may be doubted whether he is ever 
seen to greater advantage than at such a time. So Rosa would 
have naturally thought (even if she hadn’t been conducted over the 
ship with all the homage due to the First Lady of the Admiralty, 
or First Fairy of the Sea), that it was charming to see and 
hear Mr. Tartar half laughing at, and half rejoicing in, his various 
contrivances. So Rosa would have naturally thought, anyhow, that 
the sunburnt sailor showed to great advantage when, the inspection 
finished, he delicately withdrew out of his admiral’s cabin, beseech- 
ing her to consider herself its Queen, and waving her free of 
his flower-garden with the hand that had had Mr. Crisparkle’s life 
in it. 

“ Helena ! Helena Landless ! Are you there ? ” 

“ Who speaks to me ? Not Rosa ? ” Then a second handsome 
face appearing. 

“Yes, my darling ! ” 

“ Why, how did you come here, dearest ? ” 

“I — I don’t quite know,” said Rosa with a blush ; “ unless I am 
dreaming ! ” 

Why with a blush ? For their two faces were alone with the 


536 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


other flowers. Are blushes among the fruits of the country of the 
magic bean-stalk ? • 

“/ am not dreaming,” said Helena, smiling. “I should take 
more for granted if I were. How do we come together — or so 
near together — so very unexpectedly ? ” 

Unexpectedly indeed, among the dingy gables and chimney-pots 
of P. J. T.’s connection, and the flowers that had sprung from the 
salt sea. But Rosa, waking, told in a hurry how they came to be 
together, and all the why and wherefore of that matter. 

“And Mr. Crisparkle is here,” said Rosa, in rapid conclusion; 
“and, could you believe it? long ago he saved his life ! ” 

“ I could believe any such thing of Mr. Crisparkle,” returned 
Helena, with a mantling face. 

(More blushes in the bean-stalk country !) 

“Yes, but it wasn’t Mr. Crisparkle,” said Rosa, quickly putting 
in the correction. 

“ I don’t understand, love.” 

“ It was very nice of Mr. Crisparkle to be saved,” said Rosa, 
“and he couldn’t have shown his high opinion of Mr. Tartar more 
expressively. But it was Mr. Tartar who saved him.” 

Helena’s dark eyes looked very earnestly at the bright face 
among the leaves, and she asked, in a slower and more thoughtful 
tone : 

“ Is Mr. Tartar with you now, dear ? ” 

“ No ; because he has given up his rooms to me — to us, I mean. 
It is such a beautiful place ! ” 

“Is it?” 

“ It is like the inside of the most exquisite ship that ever sailed. 
It is like — it is like — ” 

“ Like a dream ? ” suggested Helena. 

Rosa answered with a little nod, and smelled the flowers. 

Helena resumed, after a short pause of silence, during which she 
seemed (or it was Rosa’s fancy) to compassionate somebody ; “ My 
poor Neville is reading in his own room, the sun being so very 
bright on this side just now. I think he had better not know that 
you are so near.” 

“ 0, I think so too ! ” cried Rosa very readily. 

“I suppose,” pursued Helena, doubtfully, “that he must know 
by-and-bye all you have told me; but I am not sure. Ask 
Mr. Crisparkle’s advice, my darling. Ask him whether I may tell 
Neville as much or as little of what you have told me as I think 
best.” 

Rosa subsided into her state-cabin, and propounded the question. 
The Minor Canon was for the free exercise of Helena’s judgment. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


537 


“ I thank him very much,” said Helena, when Rosa emerged again 
with her report. “ Ask him whether it would he best to wait 
until any more maligning and pursuing of Neville on the part of 
this wretch shall disclose itself, or to try to anticipate it : I mean, 
so far as to find out whether any such goes on darkly about us ? ” 

The Minor Canon found this point so difficult to give a confident 
opinion on, that, after two or three attempts and failures, he sug- 
gested a reference to Mr. Grewgious. Helena acquiescing, he betook 
himself (with a most unsuccessful assumption of lounging indiffer- 
ence) across the quadrangle to P. J. T.’s, and stated it. Mr. Grew- 
gious held decidedly to the general principle, that if you could steal 
a march upon a brigand or a wild beast, you had better do it ; and 
he also held decidedly to the special case, that John Jasper was a 
brigand and a wild beast in combination. 

Thus advised, Mr. Crisparkle came back again and reported to 
Rosa, who in her turn reported to Helena. She now steadily pur- 
suing her train of thought at her window, considered thereupon. 

“We may count on Mr. Tartar’s readiness to help us, Rosa ? ” 
she inquired. 

0 yes ! Rosa shyly thought so. 0 yes, Rosa shyly believed 
she could almost answer for it. But should she ask Mr. Crisparkle ? 
“ I think your authority on the point as g§od as his, my dear,” said 
Helena, sedately, “ and you needn’t disappear again for that.” 
Odd of Helena ! 

“You see, Neville,” Helena pursued after more reflection, “knows 
no one else here : he has not so much as exchanged a word with any 
one else here. If Mr. Tartar would call to see him openly and 
often ; if he would spare a minute for the purpose, frequently ; if 
he would even do so, almost daily ; something might come of it.” 

“ Something might come of it, dear 'I ” repeated Rosa, surveying 
her friend’s beauty with a highly perplexed face. “Something 
might ? ” 

“ If Neville’s movements are really watched, and if the purpose 
really is to isolate him from all friends and acquaintance and wear 
his daily life out grain by grain (which would seem to be the threat 
to you), does it not appear likely,” said Helena, “ that his enemy 
would in some way communicate with Mr. Tartar to warn him off 
from Neville? In which case, we might not only know the fact, 
but might know from Mr. Tartar what the terms of the communi- 
cation were.” 

“I see ! ” cried Rosa. And immediately darted into her state- 
^ cabin again. 

Presently her pretty face reappeared, with a greatly heightened 
colour, and she said that she had told Mr. Crisparkle, and that 


538 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


Mr. Crisparkle had fetched in Mr. Tartar, and that Mr. Tartar — 
“ who is waiting now, in case you want him,” added Rosa, with 
a half look back, and in not a little confusion between the inside 
of the state-cabin and out — had declared his readiness to act as 
she had suggested, and to enter on his task that very day. 

“ I thank him from my heart,” said Helena. “ Pray tell him 
so.” 

Again not a little confused between the Flower-garden and the 
Cabin, Rosa dipped in with her message, and dipped out again 
with more assurances from Mr. Tartar, and stood wavering in a 
divided state between Helena and him, which proved that confusion 
is not always necessarily awkward, but may sometimes present a 
very pleasant appearance. 

“ And now, darling,” said Helena, “ we will be mindful of the 
caution that has restricted us to this interview for the present, and 
will part. I hear Neville moving too. Are you going back ? ” 

“ To Miss Twinkleton’s ? ” asked Rosa. 

“Yes.” 

“ 0, I could never go there any more ; I couldn’t indeed, after 
that dreadful interview ! ” said Rosa. 

“ Then where are you going, pretty one % ” 

“Now I come to think of it, I don’t know,” said Rosa. “I 
have settled nothing at all yet, but my guardian will take care of 
me. Don’t be uneasy, dear. I shall be sure to be somewhere.” 

(It did seem likely.) 

“ And I shall hear of my Rosebud from Mr. Tartar ? ” inquired 
Helena. 

“Yes, I suppose so; from — ” Rosa looked back again in a 
flutter, instead of supplying the name. “ But tell me one thing 
before we part, dearest Helena. Tell me that you are sure, sure, 
sure, I couldn’t help it.” 

“ Help it, love ? ” 

“ Help making him malicious and revengeful. I couldn’t hold 
any terms with him, could I ? ” 

“You know how I love you, darling,” answered Helena, with 
indignation ; “ but I would sooner see you dead at his wicked feet.” 

“ That’s a great comfort to me ! And you will tell your poor 
brother so, won’t you ? And you will give him my remembrance 
and my sympathy % And you will ask him not to hate me ? ” 

With a mournful shake of the head, as if that would be quite a 
superfluous entreaty, Helena lovingly kissed her two hands to her 
friend, and her friend’s two hands were kissed to her ; arid then she 
saw a third hand (a brown one) appear among the flowers and 
leaves, and help her friend out of sight. 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


539 


The refection that Mr. Tartar produced in the Admiral’s 
Cabin by merely touching the spring knob of a locker and the 
handle of a drawer, was a dazzling enchanted repast. Wonderful 
macaroons, glittering liqueurs, magically-preserved tropical spices, 
and jellies of celestial tropical fruits, displayed themselves profusely 
at an instant’s notice. But Mr. Tartar could not make time stand 
still; and time, with his hardhearted fleetness, strode on so fast, 
that Rosa was obliged to come down from the bean-stalk country 
to earth and her guardian’s chambers. 

“ And now, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ what is to be done 
next ? To put the same thought in another form ; what is to be 
done with you ? ” 

Rosa could only look apologetically sensible of being very much 
in her own way and- in everybody else’s. Some passing idea of 
living, fireproof, up a good many stairs in Furnival’s Inn for the 
rest of her life, was the only thing in the nature of a plan that 
occurred to her. 

“It has come into my thoughts,” said Mr. Grewgious, “that 
as the respected lady, Miss Twinkleton, occasionally repairs to 
London in the recess, with the view of extending her connection, 
and being available for interviews with metropolitan parents, if any 
— whether, until we have time in which to turn ourselves round, 
we might invite Miss Twinkleton to come and stay with you for a 
month ? ” 

“ Stay where, sir 1 ” 

“Whether,” explained Mr. Grewgious, “we might take a fur- 
nished lodging in town for a month, and invite Miss Twinkleton 
to assume the charge of you in it for that period ? ” 

“And afterwards?” hinted Rosa. 

“And afterwards,” said Mr. Grewgious, “we should be no 
worse off than we are now.” 

“ I think that might smooth the way,” assented Rosa. 

“Then let us,” said Mr. Grewgious, rising, “go and look for a 
furnished lodging. Nothing could be more acceptable to me than 
the sweet presence of last evening, for all the remaining evenings 
of my existence ; but these are not fit surroundings for a young 
lady. Let us set out in quest of adventures, and look for a 
furnished lodging. In the meantime, Mr. Crisparkle here, about 
to return home immediately, will no doubt kindly see Miss 
Twinkleton, and invite that lady to co-operate in our plan.” 

Mr. Crisparkle, willingly accepting the commission, took his 
departure; Mr. Grewgious and his ward set forth on their 
expedition. 

As Mr. Grewgious’s idea of looking at a furnished lodging was 


640 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


to get on the opposite side of the street to a house with a suitable 
bill in the window, and stare at it ; and then work his way 
tortuously to the back of the house, and stare at that ; and then 
not go in, but make similar trials of another house, with the same 
result ; their progress was but slow. At length he bethought 
himself of a widowed cousin, divers times removed, of Mr. 
Bazzard’s, who had once solicited his influence in the lodger 
world, and who lived in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square. 
This lady’s name, stated in uncompromising capitals of considerable 
size on a brass doorplate, and yet not lucidly as to sex or condition, 
was Billickin. 

Personal faintness, and an overpowering personal candour, were 
the distinguishing features of Mrs. Billickin’s organisation. She 
came languishing out of her own exclusive- back parlour, with 
the air of having been expressly brought-to for the purpose, from 
an accumulation of several swoons. 

“I hope I see you well, sir,” said Mrs. Billickin, recognising her 
visitor with a bend. 

“ Thank you, quite well. And you, ma’am ? ” returned Mr. 
Grewgious. 

“I am as well,” said Mrs. Billickin, becoming aspirational 
with excess of faintness, “as I hever ham.” 

“ My ward and an elderly lady,” said Mr. Grewgious, “ wish to 
find a genteel lodging for a month or so. Have you any apart- 
ments available, ma’am?” 

“ Mr. Grewgious,” returned Mrs. Billickin, “ I will not deceive 
you ; far from it. I have apartments available.” 

This with the air of adding : “ Convey me to the stake, if you 
will ; but while I live, I will be candid.” 

“ And now, what apartments, ma’am ? ” asked Mr. Grewgious, 
cosily. To tame a certain severity apparent on the part of Mrs. 
Billickin. 

“ There is this sitting-room — which, call it what you will, it 
is the front parlour. Miss,” said Mrs. Billickin, impressing Rosa 
into the conversation : “ the back parlour being what I cling to 
and never part with ; and there is two bedrooms at the top of 
the ’ouse with gas laid on. I do not tell you that your bedroom 
floors is firm, for firm they are not. The gas-fitter himself allowed, 
that to make a firm job, he must go right under your jistes, and it 
were not worth the outlay as a yearly tenant so to do. The piping 
is carried above your jistes, and it is best that it should be made 
known to you.” 

Mr. Grewgious and Rosa exchanged looks of some dismay, 
though they had not the least idea what latent horrors this 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


541 


carriage of the piping might involve. Mrs. Billickin put her 
hand to her heart, as having eased it of a load. 

“ Well ! The roof is all right, no doubt,” said Mr. Grewgious, 
plucking up a little. 

“Mr. Grewgious,” returned Mrs. Billickin, “if I was to tell 
you, sir, that to have nothink above you is to have a floor above 
you, I should put a deception upon you which I will not do. No, 
sir. Your slates will rattle loose at that elewation in windy 
weather, do your ^utmost, best or worst ! I defy you, sir, be you 
what you may, to keep your slates tight, tiy how you can.” Here 
Mrs. Billickin, having been warm with Mr. Grewgious, cooled a 
little, not to abuse the moral power she held over him. “ Conse- 
quent,” proceeded Mrs. Billickin, more mildly, but still firmly in 
her incorruptible candour : “consequent it would be worse than 
of no use for me to trapse and travel up to the top of the ’ouse 
with you, and for you to say, ‘Mrs. Billickin, what stain do I 
notice in the ceiling, for a stain I do consider it ? ’ and for me to 
answer, ‘ I do not understand you, sir.’ No, sir, I will not be so 
underhand. I do understand you before you pint it out. It is 
the wet, sir. It do come in, and it do not come in. You may 
lay dry there half your lifetime ; but the time will come, and it 
is best that you should know it, when a dripping sop would be no 
name for you.” 

Mr. Grewgious looked much disgraced by being prefigured in 
this pickle. 

“ Have you any other apartments, ma’am ? ” he asked. 

“Mr. Grewgious,” returned Mrs. Billickin, with much solem- 
nity, “ I have. You ask me have I, and my open and my honest 
answer air, I have. The first and second floors is wacant, and 
sweet rooms.” 

“ Come, come ! There’s nothing against them” said Mr. Grew- 
gious, comforting himself. 

“Mr. Grewgious,” replied Mrs. Billickin, “pardon me, there is 
the stairs. Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will 
lead to inevitable disappointment. You cannot. Miss,” said Mrs. 
Billickin, addressing Rosa reproachfully, “place a first floor, and 
far less a second, on the level footing of a parlour. No, you can- 
not do it. Miss, it is beyond your power, and wherefore try 1 ” 

Mrs. Billickin put it very feelingly, as if Rosa had shown a 
headstrong determination to hold the untenable position. 

“ Can we see these rooms, ma’am ? ” inquired her guardian. 

“Mr. Grewgious,” returned Mrs. Billickin, “you can. I will 
not disguise it from you, sir ; you can.” 

Mrs. Billickin then sent into her back-parlour for her shawl (it 


542 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


being a state fiction, dating from immemorial antiquity, that she 
could never go anywhere without being wrapped up), and having 
been enrolled by her attendant, led the way. She made various 
genteel pauses on the stairs for breath, and clutched at her heart 
in the drawing-room as if it had very nearly got loose, and she had 
caught it in the act of taking wing. 

“And the second floor?” said Mr. Grewgious, on finding the 
first satisfactory. 

“Mr. Grewgious,” replied Mrs. Billickin, turning upon him with 
ceremony, as if the time had now come when a distinct understand- 
ing on a difficult point must be arrived at, and a solemn confidence 
established, “ the second floor is over this.” 

“ Can we see that too, ma’am ? ” 

“Yes, sir,” returned Mrs. Billickin, “it is open as the day.” 

That also proving satisfactory, Mr. Grewgious retired into a 
window with Rosa for a few words of consultation, and then ask- 
ing for pen and ink, sketched out a line or two of agreement. In 
the meantime Mrs. Billickin took a seat, and delivered a kind of 
Index to, or Abstract of, the general question. 

“ Five-and-forty shillings per week by the month certain at the 
time of year,” said Mrs. Billickin, “is only reasonable to both 
parties. It is not Bond-street nor yet St. James’s Palace ; but it 
is not pretended that it is. Neither is it attempted to be denied 
— for why should it? — that the Arching leads to a mews. 
Mewses must exist. Respecting attendance; two is kep’, at lib- 
eral wages. Words has arisen as to tradesmen, but dirty shoes 
on the fresh hearth-stoning was attributable, and no wish for a 
commission on your orders. Coals is either hy the fire, or per the 
scuttle.” She emphasised the prepositions as marking a subtle 
but immense difference. “ Dogs is not viewed with faviour. 
Besides litter, they gets stole, and sharing suspicions is apt to 
creep in, and unpleasantness takes place.” 

By this time Mr. Grewgious had his agreement-lines, and his 
earnest-money, ready. “ I have signed it for the ladies, ma’am,” 
he said, “and you’ll have the goodness to sign it for yourself, 
Christian and Surname, there, if you please.” 

“Mr. Grewgious,” said Mrs. Billickin in a new burst of candour, 
“no, sir ! You must excuse the Christian name.” 

Mr. Grewgious stared at her. 

“The doorplate is used as a protection,” said Mrs. Billickin, 
“and acts as such, and go from it I will not.” 

Mr. Grewgious stared at Rosa. 

“No, Mr. Grewgious, you must excuse me. So long as this 
’ouse is known indefinite as Billickin’s, and so long as it is a doubt 



UP THE KIVER 






544 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


with the riff-raff where Billickin may be hidin’, near the street- 
door or down the airy, and what his weight and size, so long I 
feel safe. But commit myself to a solitary female statement, no. 
Miss ! Nor would you for a moment wish,” said Mrs. Billickin, 
with a strong sense of injury, “to take that advantage of your 
sex, if you were not brought to it by inconsiderate example.” 

Rosa reddening as if she had made some most disgraceful 
attempt to overreach the good lady, besought Mr. Grewgious to 
rest content with any signature. And accordingly, in a baronial 
way, the sign-manual Billickin got appended to the document. 

Details were then settled for taking possession on the next day 
but one, when Miss Twinkleton might be reasonably expected; 
and Rosa went back to Furnival’s Inn on her guardian’s arm. 

Behold Mr. Tartar walking up and down Furnival’s Inn, check- 
ing himself when he saw them coming, and advancing towards 
them ! 

“ It occurred to me,” hinted Mr. Tartar, “ that we might go up 
the river, the weather being so delicious and the tide serving. I 
have a boat of my own at the Temple Stairs.” 

“ I have not been up the river for this many a day,” said Mr. 
Grewgious, tempted. 

“ I was never up the river,” added Rosa. 

Within half an hour they were setting this matter right by 
going up the river. The tide was running with them, the after- 
noon was charming. Mr. Tartar’s boat was perfect. Mr. Tartar 
and Lobley (Mr. Tartar’s man) pulled a pair of oars. Mr. Tartar 
had a yacht, it seemed, lying somewhere down by Greenhithe; 
and Mr. Tartar’s man had charge of this yacht, and was detached 
upon his present service. He was a jplly favoured man, with 
tawny hair and whiskers, and a big red face. He was the dead 
image of the sun in old woodcuts, his hair and whiskers answer- 
ing for rays all around him. Resplendent in the bow of the boat, 
he was a shining sight, with a man-of-war’s man’s shirt on — or off, 
according to opinion — and his arms and breast tattooed all sorts 
of patterns. Lobley seemed to take it easily, and so did Mr. Tar- 
tar; yet their oars bent as they pulled, and the boat bounded 
under them. Mr. Tartar talked as if he were doing nothing, to 
Rosa who was really doing nothing, and to Mr. Grewgious who 
was doing this much that he steered all wrong ; but what did that 
matter, when a turn of Mr. Tartar’s skilful wrist, or a mere grin 
of Mr. Lobley’s over the bow, put all to rights ! The tide bore 
them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they 
stopped to dine in some everlastingly-green garden, needing no 
matter-of-fact identification here; and then the tide obligingly 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


545 


turned — being devoted to that party alone for that day ; and as 
they floated idly among some osier-beds, Rosa tried what she could 
do in the rowing way, and came off splendidly, being much assisted ; 
and Mr. Grewgious tried what he could do, and came off on his 
back, doubled up with an oar under his chin, being not assisted 
at all. Then there was an interval of rest under boughs (such 
rest !) what time Mr. Lobley mopped, and, arranging cushions, 
stretchers, and the like, danced the tight-rope the whole length of 
the boat like a man to whom shoes were a superstition and stock- 
ings slavery; and then came the sweet return among delicious 
odours of limes in bloom, and musical ripplings ; and, all too soon, 
the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark 
bridges spanned them as death spans life, and the everlastingly- 
green garden seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and 
far away. 

“ Cannot people get through life without gritty stages, I won- 
der?” Rosa thought next day, when the town was very gritty 
again, and everything had a strange and an uncomfortable appear- 
ance of seeming to wait for something that wouldn’t come. No. 
She began to think, that, now the Cloisterham school-days had 
glided past and gone, the gritty stages would begin to set in at 
intervals and make themselves wearily known ! 

Yet what did Rosa expect ? Did she expect Miss Twinkleton ? 
Miss Twinkleton duly came. Forth from her back-parlour issued 
the Billickin to receive Miss Twinkleton, and War was in the Bil- 
lickin’s eye from that fell moment. 

Miss Twinkleton brought a quantity of luggage with her, having 
all Rosa’s as well as her own. The Billickin took it ill that Miss 
Twinkleton’s mind, being sorely disturbed by this luggage, failed to 
take in her personal identity with that clearness of perception which 
was due to its demands. Stateliness mounted her gloomy throne 
upon the Billickin’s brow in consequence. And when Miss Twin- 
kleton, in agitation taking stock of her trunks and packages, of 
which she had seventeen, particularly counted in the Billickin her- 
self as number eleven, the B. found it necessary to repudiate. 

“ Things cannot too soon be put upon the footing,” said she, with 
a candour so demonstrative as to be almost obtrusive, “ that the 
person of the ’ouse is not a box nor yet a bundle, nor a carpet-bag. 
No, I am ’ily obleeged to you, Miss Twinkleton, nor yet a beggar.” 

This last disclaimer had reference to Miss Twinkleton’s distract- 
edly pressing two-and-sixpence on her, instead of the cabman. 

Thus cast off. Miss Twinkleton wildly inquired, “ which gentle- 
man ” was to be paid ? There being two gentlemen in that position 
(Miss Twinkleton having arrived with two cabs), each gentleman 

2 N 


546 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


on being paid held forth his two-and-sixpence on the flat of his 
open hand, and, with a speechless stare and a dropped jaw, dis- 
played his wrong to heaven and earth. Terrified by this alarming 
spectacle. Miss Twinkleton placed another shilling in each hand ; 
at the same time appealing to the law in flurried accents, and re- 
counting her luggage this time wdth the twm gentlemen in, who 
caused the total to come out complicated. Meanwhile the two 
gentlemen, each looking very hard at the last shilling grumblingly, 
as if it might become eighteenpence if he kept his eyes on it, de- 
scended the doorsteps, ascended their carriages, and drove away, 
leaving Miss Twinkleton on a bonnet-box in tears. 

The Billickin beheld this manifestation of weakness without 
sympathy, and gave directions for “a young man to be got in” to 
wrestle with the luggage. When that gladiator had disappeared 
from the arena, peace ensued, and the new lodgers dined. 

But the Billickin had somehow come to the knowledge that Miss 
Twinkleton kept a school. The leap from that knowledge to the 
inference that Miss Twinkleton set herself to teach her something, 
w^as easy. “ But you don’t do it,” soliloquised the Billickin ; 
am not your pupil, whatever she,” meaning Rosa, “may be, poor 
thing ! ” 

Miss Twinkleton, on the other hand, having changed her dress 
and recovered her spirits, was animated by a bland desire to im- 
prove the occasion in all ways, and to be as serene a model as possi- 
ble. In a happy compromise betw'een her two states of existence, 
she had already become, with her wmrkbasket before her, the equa- 
bly vivacious companion with a slight judicious flavouring of infor- 
mation, when the Billickin announced herself. 

' “ I will not hide from you, ladies,” said the B., enveloped in the 
shawd of state, “for it is not my character to hide neither my mo- 
tives nor my actions, that I take the liberty to look in upon you 
to express a ’ope that your dinner was to your liking. Though 
not Professed but Plain, still her wages should be a sufiicient object 
to her to stimulate to soar above mere roast and biled.” 

“We dined very well indeed,” said Rosa, “thank you.” 

“Accustomed,” said Miss Twinkleton with a gracious air, wdiich 
to the jealous ears of the Billickin seemed to add “my good 
woman ” — “ accustomed to a liberal and nutritious, yet plain and 
salutary diet, we have found no reason to bemoan our absence from 
the ancient city, and the methodical household, in which the quiet 
routine of our lot has been hitherto cast.” 

“I did think it well to mention to my cook,” observed the Bil- 
lickin with a gush of candour, “which I- ’ope you wdll agree with. 
Miss Twinkleton, was a right precaution, that the young lady 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


547 


being used to what we should consider here but poor diet, had bet- 
ter be brought forward by degrees. For, a rush from scanty feed- 
ing to generous feeding, and from what you may call messing to 
what you may call method, do require a power of constitution 
which is not often found in youth, particular when undermined by 
boarding-school ! ” 

It will be seen that the Billickin now openly pitted herself 
against Miss Twinkleton, as one whom she had fully ascertained to 
be her natural enemy. 

“ Your remarks,” returned Miss Twinkleton, from a remote 
moral eminence, “ are well meant, I have no doubt ; but you will 
permit me to observe that they develop a mistaken view of the 
subject, which can only be imputed to your extreme want of accu- 
rate information.” 

“ My informiation,” retorted the Billickin, throwing in an extra 
syllable for the sake of emphasis at once polite and powerful 
— “ my informiation. Miss Twinkleton, were my own experience, 
which I believe is usually considered to be good guidance. But 
whether so or not, I was put in youth to a very genteel boarding- 
school, the mistress being no less a lady than yourself, of about 
your own age or it may be some years younger, and a poorness 
of blood flowed from the table which has run through my life.” 

“Very likely,” said Miss Twinkleton, still from her distant emi- 
nence ; “ and very much to be deplored. — Rosa, my dear, how are 
you getting on with your work ? ” 

“Miss Twinkleton,” resumed the Billickin, in a courtly manner, 
“ before retiring on the ’int, as a lady should, I wish to ask of 
yourself, as a lady, whether I am to consider that my words is 
doubted ? ” 

“ I am not aware on what ground you cherish such a supposi- 
tion,” began Miss Twinkleton, when the Billickin neatly stopped 
her. 

“ Do not, if you please, put suppositions betwixt my lips where 
none such have been imparted by myself. Your flow of words is 
great. Miss Twinkleton, and no doubt is expected from you by your 
pupils, and no doubt is considered worth the money. No doubt, 
I am sure. But not paying for flows of words, and not asking to 
be favoured with them here, I wish to repeat my question.” 

“ If you refer to the poverty of your circulation,” began Miss 
Twinkleton, when again the Billickin neatly stopped her. 

“ I have used no such expressions.” 

“ If you refer, then, to the poorness of your blood — ” 

“ Brought upon me,” stipulated the Billickin, expressly, “ at a 
boarding-school — ” 


548 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


“Then,” resumed Miss Twinkleton, “all I can say is, that I am 
bound to believe, on your asseveration, that it is very poor indeed. 
I cannot forbear adding, that if that unfortunate circumstance influ- 
ences your conversation, it is much to be lamented, and it is emi- 
nently desirable that your blood were richer. — Rosa, my dear, 
how are you getting on with your work ? ” 

“ Hem ! Before retiring. Miss,” proclaimed the Billickin to 
Rosa, loftily cancelling Miss Twinkleton, “ I should wish it to be 
understood between yourself and me that my transactions in future 
is with you alone. I know no elderly lady here, Miss, none older 
than yourself” 

“A highly desirable arrangement, Rosa my dear,” observed Miss 
Twinkleton. 

“It is not. Miss,” said the Billickin, with a sarcastic smile, 
“ that I possess the Mill I have heard of, in which old single ladies 
could be ground up young (what a gift it would be to some of us), 
but that I limit myself to you totally.” 

“ When I have any desire to communicate a request to the per- 
son of the house, Rosa my dear,” observed Miss Twinkleton with 
majestic cheerfulness, “ I will make it known to you, and you will 
kindly undertake, I am sure, that it is conveyed to the proper 
quarter.” 

“ Good evening, Miss,” said the Billickin, at once affectionately 
and distantly. “ Being alone in my eyes, I wish you good evening 
with best wishes, and do not find myself drove, I am truly ’appy 
to say, into expressing my contempt for an indiwidual, unfortu- 
nately for yourself, belonging to you.” 

The Billickin gracefully withdrew with this parting speech, and 
from that time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock 
between these two battledores. Nothing could be done without a 
smart match being played out. Thus', on the daily -arising question 
of dinner. Miss Twinkleton would say, the three being present 
together : 

“ Perhaps, my love, you will consult with the person of the house, 
whether she can procure us a lamb’s fry ; or, failing that, a roast 
fowl.” 

On which the Billickin would retort (Rosa not having spoken a 
word), “If you was better accustomed to butcher’s meat. Miss, 
you would not entertain the idea of a lamb’s fiy. Firstly, because 
lambs has long been sheep, and secondly, because there is such 
things as killing-days, and there is not. As to roast fowls, Miss, 
why you must be quite surfeited with roast fowls, letting alone your 
buying, when you market for yourself, the agedest of poultry with 
the scaliest of legs, quite as if you was accustomed to picking ’em 


THE MYSTEKY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


549 


out for cheapness. Try a little inwention, Miss. Use yourself to 
’ousekeeping a bit. Come now, think of somethink else.” 

To this encouragement, offered with the indulgent toleration of 
a wise and liberal expert. Miss Twinkleton would rejoin, reddening : 

“Or, my dear, you might propose to the person of the house 
a duck.” 

“Well, Miss ! ” the Billickin would exclaim (still no word being 
spoken by Rosa), “you do surprise me when you speak of ducks ! 
Not to mention that they’re getting out of season and very dear, 
it really strikes to my heart to see you have a duck ; for the breast, 
which is the only delicate cuts in a duck, always goes in a direc- 
tion which I cannot imagine where, and your own plate comes 
down so miserably skin-and-bony ! Try again. Miss. Think more 
of yourself, and less of others. A dish of sweetbreads now, or a 
bit of mutton. Something at which you can get your equal chance.” 

Occasionally the game would wax very brisk indeed, and would 
be kept up with a smartness rendering such an encounter as this 
quite tame. But the Billickin almost invariably made by far the 
higher score ; and would come in with side hits of the most unex- 
pected and extraordinary description, when she seemed without a 
chance. • 

All this did not improve the gritty state of things in London, or 
the air that London had acquired in Rosa’s eyes of waiting for 
something that never came. Tired of working, and conversing 
with Miss Twinkleton, she suggested working and reading : to 
which Miss Twinkleton readily assented, as an admirable reader, 
of tried powers. But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss 
Twinkleton didn’t read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated 
passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glar- 
ing pious frauds. As an instance in point, take the glowing pas- 
sage ; “ Ever dearest and best adored, — said Edward, clasping 
the dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair through 
his caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like golden 
rain, — ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the unsympa- 
thetic world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the 
rich warm Paradise of Trust and Love.” Miss Twinkleton’s fraud- 
ulent version tamely ran thus : “ Ever engaged to me with the con- 
sent of our parents on both sides, and the approbation of the silver- 
haired rector of the district, — said Edward, respectfully raising to 
his lips the taper fingers so skilful in embroidery, tambour, crochet, 
and other truly feminine arts, — let me call on thy papa ere to- 
morrow’s dawn has sunk into the west, and propose a suburban 
establishment, lowly it may be, but within our means, where he will 
be always welcome as an evening guest, and where every arrange- 


550 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


ment shall invest economy, and constant interchange of scholastic 
acquirements with the attributes of the ministering angel to domes- 
tic bliss.” 

As the days crept on and nothing happened, the neighbours 
began to say that the pretty girl at Billickin’s who looked so wist- 
fully and so much out of the gritty windows of the drawing-room, 
seemed to be losing her spirits. The pretty girl might have lost 
them but for the accident of lighting on some books of voyages 
and sea-adventure. As a compensation against their romance. Miss 
Twinkleton, reading aloud, made the most of all the latitudes and 
longitudes, bearings, winds, currents, offsets, and other statistics 
(which she felt to be none the less improving because they expressed 
nothing whatever to her) ; while Rosa, listening intently, made the 
most of what was nearest to her heart. So they both did better 
than before. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE DAWN AGAIN. 

Although Mr. Crisparkle and John Jasper niet daily under 
the Cathedral roof, nothing at any time passed between them hav- 
ing reference to Edwin Drood, after the time, more than half a 
year gone by, when Jasper mutely showed the Minor Canon the 
conclusion and the resolution entered in his Diary. It is not likely 
that they ever met, though so often, without the thoughts of each 
reverting to the subject. It is not likely that they ever met, 
though so often, without a sensation on the part of each that the 
other was a perplexing secret to him. Jasper as the denouncer 
and pursuer of Neville Landless, and Mr. Crisparkle as his consist- 
ent advocate and protector, must at least have stood sufficiently 
in opposition to have speculated with keen interest on the steadi- 
ness and next direction of the other’s designs. But neither ever 
broached the theme. 

False pretence not being in the Minor Canon’s nature, he doubt- 
less displayed openly that he would at any time have revived the 
subject, and even desired to discuss it. The determined reticence 
of Jasper, however, was not to b^ so approached. Impassive, 
moody, solitary, resolute, so concentrated on one idea, and on its 
attendant fixed purpose, that he would share it with no fellow- 
creature, he lived apart from human life. Constantly exercising 
an Art which brought him into mechanical harmony with others, 
and which could not have been pursued unless he and they had 
been in the nicest mechanical relations and unison, it is curious to 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


551 


consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or 
interchange with nothing around him. This indeed he had con- 
fided to his lost nephew, before the occasion for his present inflexi- 
bility arose. 

. That he must know of Rosa’s abrupt departure, and that he 
must divine its cause, was not to be doubted. Did he suppose 
that he had terrified her into silence or did he suppose that she 
had imparted to any one — to Mr. Crisparkle himself, for instance 
— tlie particulars of his last interview with her ? Mr. Crisparkle 
could not determine this in his mind. He could not but admit, 
however, as a just man, that it was not, of itself, a crime to fall in 
love with Rosa, any more than it was a crime to offer to set love 
above revenge. 

The dreadful suspicion of Jasper, which Rosa was so shocked to 
have received into her imagination, appeared to have no harbour 
in Mr. Crisparkle’s. If it ever haunted Helena’s thoughts or Ne- 
ville’s, neither gave it one spoken word of utterance. Mr. Grew- 
gious took no pains to conceal his implacable dislike of Jasper, yet 
he never referred it, however distantly, to such a source. But he 
was a reticent as well as an eccentric man ; and he made no mention 
of a certain evening when he warmed his hands at the gatehouse 
fire, and looked steadily down upon a certain heap of torn and miry 
clothes upon the floor. 

Drowsy Cloisterham, whenever it awoke to a passing reconsider- 
ation of a story above six months old and dismissed by the bench 
of magistrates, was pretty equally divided in opinion whether John 
Jasper’s beloved nephew had been killed by his treacherously pas- 
sionate rival, or in an open struggle; or had, for his own purposes, 
spirited himself away. It then lifted up its head, to notice that 
the bereaved Jasper was still ever devoted to discovery and revenge ; 
and then dozed off again. This was the condition of matters, all 
round, at the period to which the present history has now attained. 

The Cathedral doors have closed for the night ; and the Choir- 
master, on a short leave of absence for two or three services, sets 
his face towards London. He travels thither by the means by 
which Rosa travelled, and arrives, as Rosa arrived, on a hot, dusty 
evening. 

His travelling baggage is easily carried in his hand, and he 
repairs with it on foot, to a hybrid hotel in a little square behind 
Aldersgate Street, near the General Post Office. It is hotel, board- 
ing-house, or lodging-house, at its visitor’s option. It announces 
itself, in the new Railway Advertisers, as a novel enterprise, timidly 
beginning to spring up. It bashfully, almost apologetically, gives 
the traveller to understand that it does not expect him, on the good 


652 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


old constitutional hotel plan, to order a pint of sweet blacking for 
his drinking, and throw it away ; but insinuates that he may have 
his boots blacked instead of his stomach, and maybe also have bed, 
breakfast, attendance, and a porter up all night, for a certain fixed 
charge. From these and similar premises, many true Britons in 
the lowest spirits deduce that the times are levelling times, except 
in the article of high roads, of which there will shortly be not one 
in England. 

He eats without appetite, and soon goes forth again. Eastward 
and still eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until 
he reaches his destination : a miserable court, specially miserable 
among many such. 

He ascends a broken staircase, opens a door, looks into a dark 
stifling room, and says : “ Are you alone here ” 

“Alone, deary ; worse luck for me, and better for you,” replies a 
croaking voice. “ Come in, come in, whoever you be : I can’t see 
you till I light a match, yet I seem to know the sound of your 
speaking. I’m acquainted with you, ain’t T ? ” 

“ Light your match, and try.” 

“ So I will, deary, so I will ; but my hand that shakes, as I can’t 
lay it on a match all in a moment. And I cough so, that, put my 
matches whef^I may, I never find ’em there. They jump and start, 
as I cough and cough, like live things. Are you off* a voyage, 
deary ? ” 

“ No.” 

“Not seafaring ? ” 

“No.” 

“ Well, there’s land customers, and there’s water customers. I’m 
a mother to both. Different from Jack Chinaman t’other side the 
court. He ain’t a father to neither. It ain’t in him. And he 
ain’t got the true secret of mixing, though he charges as much as 
me that has, and more if he can get it. Here’s a match, and now 
where’s the candle? If my cough takes me, I shall cough out 
twenty matches afore I gets a light.” 

But she finds the candle, and lights it, before the cough comes on. 
It seizes her in the moment of success, and she sits down rocking 
herself to and fro, and gasping at intervals : “0, my lungs is 
awful bad ! my lungs is wore away to cabbage-nets ! ” until the fit 
is over. During its continuance she has had no power of sight, or 
any other power not absorbed in the struggle ; but as it leaves her, 
she begins to strain her eyes, and as soon as she is able to articu- 
late, she cries, staring : 

“Why, it’s you!” 

“Are you so surprised to see me? 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


553 


“I thought I never should have seen you again, deary. I 
thought you was dead, and gone to Heaven.” 

“Why?” 

“ I didn’t suppose you could have kept away, alive, so long, from 
the poor old soul with the real receipt for mixing it. And you are 
in mourning too ! Why didn’t you come and have a pipe or two of 
comfort ? Did they leave you money, perhaps, and so you didn’t 
want comfort ? ” 

“No.” 

“ Who was they as died, deary ? ” 

“A relative.” 

“Died of what, lovey?” 

“Probably, Death.” 

“We are short to-night ! ” cries the woman, with a propitiatory 
laugh. “ Short and snappish we are ! But we’re out of sorts for 
want of a smoke. We’ve got the all-overs, haven’t us, deary? 
But this is the place to cure ’em in ; this is the place where the all- 
overs is smoked off.” 

“You may make ready, then,” replies the visitor, “as soon as 
you like.” 

He divests himself of his shoes, loosens his cravat, and lies across 
the foot of the squalid bed, with his head resting on his left hand. 

“Now you begin to look like yourself,” says the woman approv- 
ingly. “Now I begin to know my old customer indeed! Been 
trying to mix for yourself this long time, poppet ? ” 

“ I have been taking it now and then in my own way.” 

“ Never take it your own way. It ain’t good for trade, and it 
ain’t good for you. Where’s my inkbottle, and where’s my thimble, 
and where’s my little spoon? He’s going to take it in a artful 
form now, my deary dear 1 ” 

Entering on her process, and beginning to bubble and blow at 
the faint spark enclosed in the hollow of her hands, she speaks from • 
time to time, in a tone of snuffling satisfaction, without leaving off. 
When he speaks, he does so without looking at her, and as if his 
thoughts were already roaming away by anticipation. 

“I’ve got a pretty many smokes ready for you, first and last, 
haven’t I, chuckey ? ” 

“A good many.” 

“ When you first come, you was quite new to it ; warn’t ye ? ” 

“ Yes, I was easily disposed of, then.” 

“ But you got on in the world, and was able by-and-bye to take 
your pipe with the best of ’em, warn’t ye ? ” 

“Ah ; and the worst.” 

“ It’s just ready for you. What a sweet singer you was when 


554 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


you first come ! Used to drop your head, and sing yourself off like 
a bird ! It’s ready for you now, deary.” 

He takes it from her with great care, and puts the mouthpiece 
to his lips. She seats herself beside him, ready to refill the pipe. 
After inhaling a few whiffs in silence, he doubtingly accosts her 
with : 

“Is it as potent as it used to be ? ” 

“ What do you speak of, deary ? ” 

“ What should I speak of, but what I have in my mouth ? ” 

“ It’s just the same. Always the identical same.” ^ 

“ It doesn’t taste so. And it’s slower.” 

“You’ve got more used to it, you see.” 

“That may be the cause, certainly. Look here.” ^He stops, 
becomes dreamy, and seems to forget that he has invited her atten- 
tion. She bends over him, and speaks in his ear. 

“ I’m attending to you. Says you just now. Look here. Says 
I now, I’m attending to ye. We was talking just before of your 
being used to it.” 

“ I know all that. I was only thinking. Look here. Suppose 
you had something in your mind; something you were going 
to do.” 

“Yes, deary ; something I was going to do ?” 

“But had not quite determined to do.” 

“Yes, deary.” 

“ Might or might not do, you understand.” 

“ Yes.” With the point of a needle she stirs the contents of 
the bowl. 

“ Should you do it in your fancy, when you were lying here do- 
ing this ? ” 

She nods her head. “ Over and over again.” 

“Just like me ! I did it over and over again. I have done it 
hundreds of thousands of times in this room.” 

“ It’s to be hoped it was pleasant to do, deary.” 

“ It was pleasant to do ! ” 

He says this with a savage air, and a spring or start at her. 
Quite unmoved she retouches and replenishes the contents of the 
bowl with her little spatula. Seeing her intent upon the occupa- 
tion, he sinks into his former attitude. 

“ It was a journey, a difficult and dangerous journey. That was 
the subject in my mind. A hazardous and perilous journey, over 
abysses where a slip would be destruction. Look down, look down ! 
You see what lies at the bottom there?” 

He has darted forward to say it, and to point at the ground, as 
though at some imaginary object far beneath. The woman looks 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


555 


at him, as his spasmodic face approaches close to hers, and not at 
his pointing. She seems to know what the influence of her perfect 
quietude would be ; if so, she has not miscalculated it, for he sub- 
sides again. 

“Well; I have told you I did it here hundreds of thousands of 
times. What do I say ? I did it millions and billions of times. 
I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when 
it was really done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so 
soon.” 

“ That’s the journey you have been away upon,” she quietly 
remarks. 

He glares at her as he smokes; and then, his eyes becoming 
filmy, answers: “That’s the journey.” 

Silence ensues. His eyes are sometimes closed and sometimes 
open. The woman sits beside him, very attentive to the pipe, 
which is all the while at his lips. 

“I’ll warrant,” she observes, when he has been looking fixedly 
at her for some consecutive moments, with a singular appearance 
in his eyes of seeming to see her a long way off, instead of so near 
him : “ I’ll warrant you made the journey in a many ways, when 
you made it so often ? ” 

“No, always in one way.” 

“ Always in the same way ? ” 

“Ay.” 

“ In the way in which it was really made at last ? ” 

“Ay.” 

“ And always took the same pleasure in harping on it ? ” 

“ Ay.” 

For the time he appears unequal to any other reply than this 
lazy monosyllabic assent. Probably to assure herself that it is not 
the assent of a mere automaton, she reverses the form of her next 
sentence. 

“ Did you never get tired of it, deary, and try to call up some- 
thing else for a change ? ” 

He struggles into a sitting posture, and retorts upon her : 
“What do you mean? What did I want? What did I come 
for ? ” 

She gently lays him back again, and before returning him the in- 
strument he has dropped, revives the fire in it with her own breath ; 
then says to him, coaxingly : 

“ Sure, sure, sure ! Yes, yes, yes ! Now I go along with you. 
You was too quick for me. I see now. You come o’ purpose* to 
take the journey. Why, I might have known it, through its stand- 
ing by you so.” 


556 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


He answers first with a laugh, and then with a passionate setting 
of his teeth : “ Yes, I came on purpose. When I could not bear 
my life, I came to get the relief, and I got it. It was one ! It 
WAS one ! ” This repetition with extraordinary vehemence, and 
the snarl of a wolf. 

She observes him very cautiously, as though mentally feeling her 
way to her next remark. It is : “ There was a fellow-traveller, 
deary.” 

“ Ha, ha, ha ! ” He breaks into a ringing laugh, or rather yell. 

“ To think,” he cries, “ how often a fellow-traveller, and yet not 
know it ! To think how many times he went the journey, and 
never saw the road ! ” 

The woman kneels upon the floor, with her arms crossed on the 
coverlet of the bed, close by him, and her chin upon them. In 
this crouching attitude she watches him. The pipe is falling from 
his mouth. She puts it back, and laying her hand upon his chest, 
moves him slightly from side to side. Upon that he speaks, as if 
she had spoken. 

“ Yes ! I always made the journey first, before the changes of 
colours and the great landscapes and glittering processions began. 
They couldn’t begin till it was off my mind. I had no room till 
then for anything else.” 

Once more he lapses into silence. Once more she lays her hand 
upon his chest, and moves him slightly to and fro, as a cat might 
stimulate a half-slain mouse. Once more he speaks, as if she had 
spoken. ' 

“What? I told you so. When it comes to be real at last, it is 
so short that it seems unreal for the first time. Hark ! ” 

“Yes, deary. I’m listening.” 

“ Time and place are both at hand.” 

He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, and as if in the dark. 

“Time, place, and fellow-traveller,” she suggests, adopting his 
tone, and holding him softly by the arm. 

“ How could the time be at hand unless the fellow-traveller was ? 
Hush ! The journey’s made. It’s over.” 

“ So soon ? ” 

“ That’s what I said to you. So soon. Wait a little. This is 
a vision. I shall sleep it off. It has been too short and easy. 
I must have a better vision than this ; this is the poorest of all. 
No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty — and yet I 
never saw that before.” With a start. 

“Saw what, deary?” 

“ Look at it ! Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is ! 
That must be real. It’s over.” 



SLEEPING IT OFF 












558 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


He has accompanied this incoherence with some wild unmeaning 
gestures ; but they trail off into the progressive inaction of stupor, 
and he lies a log upon the bed. 

The woman, however, is still inquisitive. With a repetition of 
her cat-like action she slightly stirs his body again, and listens ; 
stirs again, and listens ; whispers to it, and listens. Finding it 
past all rousing for the time, she slowly gets upon her feet, with an 
air of disappointment, and flicks the face with the back of her hand 
in turning from it. 

But she goes no further away from it than the chair upon the 
hearth. She sits in it, with an elbow on one of its arms, and her 
chin upon her hand, intent upon him. “ I heard ye say once,” she 
croaks under her breath, “ I heard ye say once, when I was lying 
where you’re lying, and you were making your speculations upon 
me, ‘ Unintelligible ! ’ I heard you say so, of two more than me. 
But don’t ye be too sure always ; don’t ye be too sure, beauty ! ” 

Unwinking, cat-like, and intent, she presently adds: “Not so 
potent as it once was ? Ah ! Perhaps not at first. You may be 
more right there. Practice makes perfect. I may have learned 
the secret how to make ye talk, deary.” 

He talks no more, whether or no. Twitching in an ugly way 
from time to time, both as to his face and limbs, he lies heavy and 
silent. The wretched candle burns down ; the woman takes its 
expiring end between her fingers, lights another at it, crams the 
guttering frying morsel deep into the candlestick, and rams it home 
with the new candle, as if she were loading some ill-savoured and 
unseemly weapon of witchcraft ; the new candle in its turn burns 
down ; and still he lies insensible. At length what remains of the 
last candle is blown out, and daylight looks into the room. 

It has not looked very long, when he sits up, chilled and shak- 
ing, slowly recovers consciousness of where he is, and makes him- 
self ready to depart. The woman receives what he pays her with 
a grateful, “ Bless ye, bless ye, deary ! ” and seems, tired out, to 
begin making herself ready for sleep as he leaves the room. 

But seeming may be false or true. It is false in this case ; for, 
the moment the stairs have ceased to creak under his tread, she 
glides after him, muttering emphatically : “I’ll not miss ye twice ! ” 

There is no egress from the court but by its entrance. With 
a weird peep from the doorway, she watches for his looking back. 
He does not look back before disappearing, with a wavering step. 
She follows him, peeps from the court, sees him still faltering on 
without looking back, and holds him in view. 

He repairs to the back of Aldersgate Street, where a door im- 
mediately opens to his knocking. She crouches in another door- 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


559 


way, watching that one, and easily comprehending that he puts up 
temporarily at that house. Her patience is unexhausted by hours. 
For sustenance she can, and does, buy bread within a hundred 
yards, and milk as it is carried past her. 

He comes forth again at noon, having changed his dress, but 
(tarrying nothing in his hand, and having nothing carried for him. 
He is not going back into the country, therefore, just yet. She 
follows him a little way, hesitates, instantaneously turns confidently, 
and goes straight into the house he has quitted. 

“ Is the gentleman from Cloisterham indoors ? ” 

“Just gone out.” 

“Unlucky. When does the gentleman return to Cloisterham?” 

“At six this evening.” 

“Bless ye and thank ye. May the Lord prosper a business 
where a civil question, even from a poor soul, is so civilly an- 
swered ! ” 

“ I’ll not miss ye twice ! ” repeats the poor soul in the street, 
and not so civilly. “ I lost ye last, where that omnibus you got 
into nigh your journey’s end plied betwixt the station and the place. 
I wasn’t so much as certain that you even went right on to the 
place. Now I know ye did. My gentleman from Cloisterham, I’ll 
be there before ye, and bide your coming. I’ve swore my oath 
that I’ll not miss ye twice ! ” 

Accordingly, that same evening the poor soul stands in Cloister- 
ham High Street, looking at the many quaint gables of the Nuns’ 
House, and getting through the time as she best can until nine 
o’clock ; at which hour she has reason to suppose that the arriving 
omnibus passengers may have some interest for her. The friendly 
darkness, at that hour, renders it easy for her to ascertain whether 
this be so or not ; and it is so, for the passenger not to be missed 
twice arrives among the rest. 

“Now let me see what becomes of you. ' Go on ! ” 

An observation addressed to the air, and yet it might be ad- 
dressed to the passenger, so compliantly does he go on along the 
High Street until he comes to an arched gateway, at which he 
unexpectedly vanishes. The poor soul quickens her pace ; is swift, 
and close upon him entering under the gateway ; but only sees a 
postern staircase on one side of it, and on the other side an ancient 
vaulted room, in which a large-headed, grey-haired gentleman is 
writing, under the odd circumstances of sitting open to the 
thoroughfare and eyeing all who pass, as if he were toll-taker of 
the gateway : though the way is free. 

“ Halloa ! ” he cries in a low voice, seeing her brought to a stand- 
still : who are you looking for ? ” 


660 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

“There was a gentleman passed in here this minute, sir.” 

“ Of course there was. What do you want with him ? ” 

“ Where do he live, deary ? ” 

“Live'? Up that staircase.” 

“ Bless ye ! Whisper. What’s his name, deary ? ” 

“Surname Jasper, Christian name John. Mr. John Jasper.” 

“ Has he a calling, good gentleman ? ” 

“Calling? Yes. Sings in the choir.” 

“In the spire ? ” 

“ Choir.” 

“What’s that?” 

Mr. Datchery rises from his papers, and comes to his doorstep. 
“ Do you know what a cathedral is ? ” he asks, jocosely. 

The woman nods. 

“ What is it ? ” 

She looks puzzled, casting about in her mind to find a definition, 
when it occurs to her that it is easier to point out the substantial 
object itself, massive against the dark-blue sky and the early stars. 

“ That’s the answer. Go in there at seven to-morrow morning, 
and you may see Mr. John Jasper, and hear him too.” 

“ Thank ye ! Thank je ! ” 

The burst of triumph in which she thanks him does not escape 
the notice of the single buffer of an easy temper living idly on his 
means. He glances at her ; clasps his hands behind him, as the 
wont of such buffers is ; and lounges along the echoing Precincts 
at her side. 

“Or,” he suggests, with a backward hitch of his head, “you 
can go up at once to Mr. Jasper’s rooms there.” 

The woman eyes him with a cunning smile, and shakes her head. 

“ 0 ! you don’t want to speak to him ? ” 

She repeats her dumb reply, and forms with her lips a soundless 
“ No.” 

“ You can admire him at a distance three times a day, whenever 
you like. It’s a long way to come for that, though.” 

The woman looks up quickly. If Mr. Datchery thinks she is to 
be so induced to declare where she eomes from, he is of a much 
easier temper than she is. But she acquits him of such an artful 
thought, as he lounges along, like the chartered bore of the city, 
with his uncovered grey hair blowing about, and his purposeless 
hands rattling the loose money in the poekets of his trousers. 

The chink of the money has an attraction for her greedy ears. 
“ Wouldn’t you help me to pay for my traveller’s lodging, dear 
gentleman, and to pay my way along ? I am a poor soul, I am 
indeed, and troubled with a grievous cough.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


561 


“You know the travellers’ lodging, I perceive, and are making ' 
directly for it,” is Mr. Datchery’s bland comment, still rattling his 
loose money. “ Been here often, my good woman 1 ” 

“ Once in all my life.” 

“ Ay, ay ? ” 

They have arrived at the entrance to the Monks’ Vineyard. An 
appropriate remembrance, presenting an exemplary model for imi- 
tation, is revived in the woman’s mind by the sight of the place. 
She stops at the gate, and says energetically : 

“By this token, though you mayn’t believe it. That a young 
gentleman gave me three and sixpence as I was coughing my breath 
away on this very grass. I asked him for three and sixpence, and 
he gave it me.” 

“ Wasn’t it a little cool to name your sum 1 ” hints Mr. Batch ery, 
still rattling. “Isn’t it customary to leave the amount open? 
Mightn’t it have had the appearance, to the young gentleman — 
only the appearance — that he was rather dictated to?” 

“Look’ee here, deary,” she replies, in a confidential and persua- 
sive tone, “ I wanted the money to lay it out on a medicine as does 
me good, and as I deal in. I told the young gentleman so, and he 
gave it me, and I laid it out honest to the last brass farden. I 
want to lay out the same sum in the same way now ; and if you’ll 
give it me. I’ll lay it out honest to the last brass farden again, 
upon my soul ! ” 

“ What’s the medicine ? ” 

“I’ll be honest with you beforehand, as well as after. It’s 
opium.” 

Mr. Datchery, with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a 
sudden look. 

“It’s opium, deary. Neither more nor less. And it’s like a 
liuman creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said 
against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise.” 

Mr. Datchery begins very slowly to count out the sum demanded 
of him. Greedily watching his hands, she continues to hold forth 
on the great example set him. 

“ It was last Christmas Eve, just arter dark, the once that I was 
here afore, when the young gentleman gave me the three and six.” 

Mr. Datchery stops in his counting, finds he has counted 
wrong, shakes his money together, and begins again. 

“And the young gentleman’s name,” she adds, “was Edwin.” 

Mr. Datchery drops some money, stoops to pick it up, and red- 
dens with the exertion as he asks : 

“ How do you know the young gentleman’s name ? ” 

“ I asked him for it, and he told it me. I only asked him the 


V 

562 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

two questions, what was his Chris’en name, and whether he’d a 
sweetheart ? And he answered, Edwin, and he hadn’t.” 

Mr. Datchery pauses with the selected coins in his hand, rather 
as if he were falling into a brown study of their value, and couldn’t 
bear to part with them. The woman looks at him distrustfully, 
and with her anger brewing for the event of his thinking better of 
the gift ; but he bestows it on her as if he were abstracting his 
mind from the sacrifice, and with many servile thanks she goes her 
way. 

John Jasper’s lamp is kindled, and his lighthouse is shining when 
Mr. Datchery returns alone towards it. As mariners on a danger- 
ous voyage, approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the 
beams of the warning light to the haven lying beyond it that may 
never be reached, so Mr. Datchery’s wistful gaze is directed to this 
beacon, and beyond. 

His object in now revisiting his lodging is merely to put on the 
hat which seems so superfluous an article in his wardrobe. It is 
half-past ten by the Cathedral clock when he walks out into the 
Precincts again ; he lingers and looks about him, as though, the 
enchanted hour when Mr. Durdles may be stoned home having 
struck, he had some expectation of seeing the Imp who is ap- 
pointed to the mission of stoning him. 

In effect, that Power of Evil is abroad. Having nothing liv- 
ing to stone at the moment, he is discovered by Mr. Datchery in 
the unholy office of stoning the dead, through the railings of the 
churchyard. The Imp finds this a relishing and piquing pursuit ; 
firstly, because their resting-place is announced to be sacred ; and 
secondly, because the tall headstones are sufficiently like them- 
selves, on their beat in the dark, to justify the delicious fancy that 
they are hurt when hit. 

Mr. Datchery hails him with : “ Halloa, Winks ! ” 

He acknowledges the hail with : “ Halloa, Dick ! ” Their 
acquaintance seemingly having been established on a familiar 
footing. 

“ But, I say,” he remonstrates, “ don’t yer go a making my name 
public. I never means to plead to no name, mind yer. When 
they says to me in the Lockup, a going to put me down in the book, 
‘What’s your name?’ I says to them, ‘Find out.’ Likeways 
when they says, ‘What’s your religion?’ I says, ‘Find out.’” 

Which, it may be observed in passing, it would be immensely 
difficult for the State, however statistical, to do. 

“Asides which,” adds the boy, “there ain’t no family of 
Winkses.” 

“ I think there must be.” 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


563 


“Yer lie, there ain’t. The travellers give me the name on 
account of my getting no settled sleep and being knocked up all 
night; whereby I gets one eye roused open afore I’ve shut the 
other. That’s what Winks means. Deputy’s the nighest name 
to indict me by : but yer wouldn’t catch me pleading to that, 
neither.” 

“Deputy be it always, then. We two are good friends; eh. 
Deputy*?” 

“Jolly good.” 

“I forgave you the debt you owed me when we first became 
acquainted, and many of my sixpences have come your way since ; 
eh. Deputy?” 

“ Ah ! And what’s more, yer ain’t no friend o’ Jarsper’s. 
What did he go a histing me off my legs for ? ” 

“ What indeed ! But never mind him now. A shilling of 
mine is going your way to-night. Deputy. You have just taken 
in a lodger I have been speaking to ; an infirm woman with a 
cough.” 

“Puffer,” assents Deputy, with a shrewd leer of recognition, and 
smoking an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side 
and his eyes very much out of their places : “ Hopeum Puffer.” 

“ What is her name ? ” 

“ ’Er Royal Highness the Princess Puffer.” 

“ She has some other name than that ; where does she live ? ” 

“Up in London. Among the Jacks.” 

“ The sailors ? ” 

“ I said so ; Jacks ; and Chayner men ; and hother Knifers.” 

“ I should like to know, through you, exactly where she lives.” 

“ All right. Give us ’old.” 

A shilling passes ; and, in that spirit of confidence which should 
pervade all business transactions between principals of honour, 
this piece of business is considered done. 

“ But here’s a lark ! ” cries Deputy. “ Where did yer think ’Er 
Royal Highness is a goin’ to to-morrow morning ? Blest if she ain’t 
a goin’ to the Kin-free-der-el ! ” He greatly prolongs the word 
in his ecstasy, and smites his leg, and doubles himself up in a fit 
of shrill laughter. 

“ How do you know that, Deputy ? ” 

“Cos she told me so just now. She said she must be hup 
and hout o’ purpose. She ses, ‘Deputy, I must ’ave a early 
wash, and make myself as swell as I can, for I’m a goin’ to take 
a turn at the Kin-free-der-el ! ’ ” He separates the syllables 
with his former zest, and, not finding his sense of the ludicrous 
sufficiently relieved by stamping about on the pavement, breaks 


564 THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 

into a slow and stately dance, perhaps supposed to be performed 
by the Dean. 

Mr. Datchery receives the communication with a well-satisfied 
though pondering face, and breaks up the conference. Returning 
to his quaint lodging, and sitting long over the supper of bread- 
and-cheese and salad and ale which Mrs. Tope has left prepared 
for him, he still sits when his supper is finished. At length he 
rises, throws open the door of a corner cupboard, and refers to a 
few uncouth chalked strokes on its inner side. 

“I like,” says Mr. Datchery, “the old tavern way of keeping 
scores. Illegible except to the scorer. The scorer not committed, 
the scored debited with what is against him. Hum ; ha ! A very 
small score this ; a veiy poor score ! ” 

He sighs over the contemplation of its poverty, takes a bit of 
chalk from one of the cupboard shelves, and pauses with it in his 
hand, uncertain what addition to make to the account. 

“I think a moderate stroke,” he concludes, “is all I am justi- 
fied in scoring up ; ” so, suits the action to the word, closes the 
cupboard, and goes to bed. 

A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and 
ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the 
sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glo- 
rious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, 
woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the 
whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the 
Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection 
and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm ; 
and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of 
the building, fluttering there like wings. 

Comes Mr. Tope with his large keys, and yawningly unlocks 
and sets open. Come Mrs. Tope and attendant sweeping sprites. 
Come, in due time, organist and bellows-boy, peeping down from 
the red curtains in the loft, fearlessly flapping dust from books up 
at that remote elevation, and whisking it from stops and pedals. 
Come sundry rooks, from various quarters of the sky, back to the 
great tower ; who may be presumed to enjoy vibration, and to 
know that bell and organ are going to give it them. Come a very 
small and straggling congregation indeed ; chiefly from Minor 
Canon Corner and the Precincts. Come Mr. Crisparkle, fresh and 
bright j and his ministering brethren, not quite so fresh and bright. 
Come the Choir in a hurry (always in a hurry, and struggling into 
their nightgowns at the last moment, like children shirking bed), 
and comes John Jasper leading their line. Last of all comes Mr.' 
Datchery into a stall, one of a choice empty collection very much 


THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. 


565 


at his service, and glancing about him for Her Royal Highness the 
Princess Puffer. 

The service is pretty well advanced before Mr. Hatchery can 
discern Her Royal Highness. But by that time he has made her 
out, in the shade. She is behind a pillar, carefully withdrawn 
from the Choir-master’s view, but regards him with the closest 
attention. All unconscious of her presence, he chants and sings. 
She grins when he is most musically fervid, and — yes, Mr. Hatch- 
ery sees her do it ! — shakes her fist at him behind the pillar’s 
friendly shelter. 

Mr. Hatchery looks again, to convince himself. Yes, again ! 
As ugly and withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under 
brackets of the stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard 
as the big brass eagle holding the sacred books upon his wings 
(and, according to the sculptor’s representation of his ferocious attri- 
butes, not at all converted by them), she hugs herself in her lean 
arms, and then shakes both fists at the leader of the Choir. 

And at that moment, outside the grated door of the Choir, hav- 
ing eluded the vigilance of Mr. Tope by shifty resources in which 
he is an adept, Heputy peeps, sharp-eyed, through the bars, and 
stares astounded from the threatener to the threatened. 

The service comes to an end, and the servitors disperse to break- 
fast. Mr. Hatchery accosts his last new acquaintance outside, 
when the Choir (as much in a hurry to get their bedgowns off, as 
they were but now to get them on) have scuffled away. 

“Well, mistress. Good morning. You have seen him?” 

“ /’ve seen him, deary ; /’ve seen him ! ” 

“ And you know him ? ” 

“ Know him ! Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put 
together know him.” * 

Mrs. Tope’s care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready 
for her lodger. Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cup- 
board door ; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf ; adds one thick 
line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to 
the bottom ; and then falls to with an appetite. 



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THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 

New Edition, with all the Original Illustrations. 


i2ino. Cloth. $1.00 each volume. 

These volumes are in all cases accurate reprints of the texts of the first editions, 
and are accompanied by all the original illustrations. There is also prefixed in each 
volume a short introduction written by Mr. Charles Dickens, the novelist’s eldest 
son, giving a history of the writing and publication of each book, together with 
other details, biographical and bibliographical, likely to be of interest to the reader. 


NOIV 

THE PICKWICK PAPERS. 

50 Illustrations. 


OLIVER TWIST. 

27 Illustrations. 

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 

44 Illustrations. 

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 

41 Illustrations. 

THE OLD curiosity' SHOP. 

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BARNABY RUDGE. 

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SKETCHES BY BOZ. 

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS and 
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CHRISTMAS STORIES. 
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AMERICAN NOTES and PIC- 
TURES FROM ITALY. 

4 Illustrations. 

LETTERS. 1833-1870. 

LITTLE DORRIT. 

BLEAK HOUSE. 

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 

TALE OF TWO CITIES and 
EDWIN DROOD. 

BY 

A CHILD’S HISTORY OF ENG- 
LAND. 

UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVEL- 
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To BE FOLLOWED BY 


' MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


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